Étienne-Louis Arthur Fallot was a physician working in France during the late nineteenth century who studied and described the four cardiac anatomical defects that cause the congenital anomaly known as the Tetralogy of Fallot. Those four heart defects result in deoxygenated blood recirculating through the body, giving the skin a blue-like color, a process called cyanosis. Numerous physicians and researchers before Fallot had identified and described the anatomical cardiac defects that would eventually be included in the Tetralogy. However, Fallot was among the first to note that the four anatomical heart defects tended to occur together. Through autopsy investigations, Fallot established the Tetralogy as one unified pathology rather than four unrelated anatomical abnormalities, providing a basis for the eventual surgical treatment of the condition, which affects approximately four out of every one thousand births worldwide.

In 2019, US-based pediatric heart doctor Clayton Smith and colleagues published “Long-Term Outcomes of Tetralogy of Fallot: A Study From the Pediatric Cardiac Care Consortium,” hereafter, “Long-Term Outcomes,” in JAMA Cardiology. The Tetralogy of Fallot, or TOF, is a group of four congenital anatomical heart abnormalities, all of which lead to the circulation of oxygen-poor blood throughout the body. Congenital conditions are ones that are present from birth. The researchers, who at the time of publication were all affiliated with US medical schools or hospitals, investigated the long-term outcomes of individuals who underwent several different types of complete repair surgery, which is the surgery that remedies all four TOF defects, within the first three months of life. Prior to the release of “Long-Term Outcomes,” studies of TOF outcomes used data from single centers in the US or non-US patient cohorts. “Long-Term Outcomes” was one of the largest US-based, multicenter studies to evaluate the effectiveness of different strategies of complete surgical repair in remedying TOF, a condition that affects around 1,700 infants born in the US every year.