Having a Partner and Having Children: Comparisons of Adults with Congenital Heart Disease and the General Population : a 15-Year Case-Control Study

Objectives: To examine whether patients with congenital heart disease (CHD) are less likely to have a partner or
children than individuals from the general population. Methods: Longitudinal study with two assessments of the
same patients (n = 244) from a hospital population and controls (n = 238) from the German Socio-Economic
Panel (GSOEP) using parental education, patients age, and sex as matching criteria. The first patient study
was conducted between 5/2003 and 6/2004, the second one between 5/2017 and 4/2019. Controls were drawn
from GSOEP-surveys 2004 and 2018. CHD-severity was classified according to type of surgery: curative, reparative,
or palliative. Living single was used as outcome measure, for offspring the outcome was having children or
not. Results: Among women with CHD the rate of those living single was higher than among controls with the
differences depending on disease complexity (curative: OR = 5.5; reparative: OR = 1.9; palliative: OR = 2.7). No
statistically significant differences between patients and controls emerged in the male study population. With
respect to children a marked difference emerged between women with CHD and controls. Among patients the
odds of having children were lower than among controls (curative: OR = 0.3; reparative: OR = 0.3; palliative:
OR = 0.2). The rate of patients with children with CHD (women: 5.6%; men: 4.9%) was higher than expected
(1%) if compared with the general population. Conclusions: Using partnership and children as outcome criteria,
patients with CHD are disadvantaged if compared to subjects from the general population. In female patients the
social consequences of the disease turned out as more pervasive than in women.