Differential diagnosis of anomalous pulmonary venous return. A clinical-roentgenological study.

The paper presents an analysis of the results of clinical and roentgenological examination of 88 patients with anomalous pulmonary venous return (42 females, 46 males), aged 2 weeks to 33 years. This defect has highly diverse anatomical variants. Its most frequent form is partial anomalous drainage (70.5%), while total drainage is much less frequent (29.5%). As regards the return level of the pulmonary veins, the site occurring most frequently is the supracardial one (63%), followed by the cardial (20%), mixed (11%) and infracardial site (6%). The authors compare the findings of X-ray examination with the results of catheterization of the right and left heart, selective angiocardiography (62) and the findings made intraoperatively (82), and assess the value of routine X-ray examination for differential diagnosis of partial and total anomalous pulmonary venous drainage at different return levels.