Extract
In the present issue of the European Respiratory Journal, Courand et al. [1] report on the prognostic relevance of radionuclide angiography of the right ventricle (RV) in a cohort of 100 patients with idiopathic, heritable or drug-related pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH). Patients with a baseline RV ejection fraction (RVEF) >25% had better survival than those with a RVEF <25%. Furthermore, patients with a stable or increased RVEF at 3–6 months had a trend to better overall survival and a significantly lower cardiovascular mortality. These results are in keeping with recently demonstrated prognostic relevance of baseline and follow-up RVEF, but measured by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in PAH patients [2]. A striking finding in both studies was the dissociation between RVEF and pulmonary vascular resistance (PVR). Thus, a decreased PVR under targeted therapies could be associated with either deterioration or improvement in RV function [1, 2]. The notion emerges that PAH is a disease of RV–arterial uncoupling rather than only of pathological pulmonary vascular remodelling [3].
Abstract
Decreased RVEF and PVR is associated with a decreased survival rate in PAH patients under targeted therapies http://ow.ly/EBK8U
Footnotes
Conflict of interest: None declared.
- Received November 11, 2014.
- Accepted November 15, 2014.
- Copyright ©ERS 2015