Propagating Knowledge: The Value of the Single Center Experience

Excerpt

How do we go about initiating new therapeutic practices in pediatric cardiology? Original studies comparing one method to another typically follow the sporadic or haphazard use of particular diagnostic or treating measures, and rarely precede it. The limited number of pediatric patients with congenital heart diseases and their diverse presentation makes it difficult to conduct well-controlled prospective studies once an idea is conceived. Instead, pediatric cardiologists typically borrow from the adult cardiology experience, use it in pediatrics, and follow by studies attempting to validate or disprove the usefulness of that particular management tool by investigating teams. In this issue of Pediatric Cardiology, three such investigative studies are published [1‐3]. These studies validate and propagate the knowledge attained from the single institutional experience of particular management measures. …