Perhaps the most common question that I get asked by my patients is “How am I doing”.  This is both a simple and a complicated question.  Over the past 20 years we have developed many tools to assess how a patient with PAH is doing.  We have a long list of tests that we can perform from heart catheterization, echocardiography, blood tests, walk tests and we are continually … [Read more...]

FDA Approval Process for PAH Drugs The past decade has seen many new drugs approved to treat PAH.  The development of a new drug is a long and expensive process.  Candidate new drugs are identified and then enter the clinical research pathway.  Before a medication is ever tested in humans, the medication is tested in a variety of laboratory settings and then in animal models.  … [Read more...]

The treatment for Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension has come a long way since the mid 1990’s when Flolan was first approved.  There has been an explosion of new medications that have dramatically altered how we treat patients.  We no longer sequentially add therapies to most of our patients.  Rather, we often start two or even three different therapies as part of an initial … [Read more...]

Pulmonary arterial hypertension is a progressive disease affecting the blood vessels of the lungs (pulmonary arteries to be specific). Without treatment, the right ventricle of the heart starts to struggle with pumping blood through the lungs. This leads to fatigue, shortness of breath, swelling, fainting and other symptoms. We are fortunate to have many medications that now … [Read more...]