Heart murmur--auscultation or echocardiography in the diagnostic assessment of congenital or valvular heart disease?

The incidence of patients with degenerative valvular but also of patients with congenital heart disease surviving until adulthood or even old age will increase in the next decades. Auscultation with the stethoscope remains an important diagnostic means in the detection and treatment of heart disease. Heart murmurs (especially systolic heart murmurs) are extremely common. There are helpful clues to differentiate heart murmurs. It can occasionally be relatively simple to differentiate a systolic murmur due to valvular heart disease from an innocent, ejection murmur; however, there are important limitations of auscultation. Overall, auscultation and clinical examination alone do not suffice to correctly diagnose and treat patients with heart failure or a murmur Clinically significant aortic stenosis, aortic regurgitation and mitral regurgitation as well as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy are not uncommonly missed or misinterpreted. An echocardiographic exam is mandatory in all patients with more than a soft systolic murmur, any diastolic murmur, cardiac symptoms and/or ECG changes.