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.