The team, led by researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital, publishes its latest findings in Nature Genetics this week. "As a clinician, there's nothing more devastating than when parents ask us about future risk for a child with CHD or for having another child, and we have to tell them, 'We don't know,'" said co-corresponding author Christine Seidman, MD, director of the BWH Cardiovascular Genetics Center and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. The new study, conducted in collaboration with researchers at seven academic centers across the U.S., leverages clinical and genetic data from more than 2,800 patients with CHD as well as information from parents. This allowed the researchers to determine which genetic mutations had been passed from parents to offspring and which had appeared spontaneously in the child's genome (known as de novo mutations).