Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Tests and diagnosis
By Mayo Clinic staff
Before birth
Because of advances in ultrasound technology, it's possible for a baby to be diagnosed with tricuspid atresia before he or she is born. Doctors can identify the condition on a routine ultrasound exam during pregnancy.
After birth
After your baby is born, his or her doctor may suspect a heart defect, such as tricuspid atresia, if your baby has a blue cast to his or her skin or is having trouble breathing. Your baby's doctor may also suspect a heart defect if he or she hears a heart murmur — an abnormal whooshing sound caused by turbulent blood flow.
Doctors typically use an echocardiogram to diagnose tricuspid atresia. This test uses high-pitched sound waves that bounce off your baby's heart to produce moving images your baby's doctor can view on a video screen.
In a baby with tricuspid atresia, the echocardiogram reveals the absence of a tricuspid valve and a smaller than normal right ventricle. Because this test tracks blood flow, it can also measure the amount of blood moving through holes in the walls between the right and left sides of the heart. In addition, an echocardiogram can identify associated heart defects, such as an atrial septal defect or a ventricular septal defect.
