Across America a woman’s right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is under threat. Without diving into politics or religion I want to impress on the PAH community why this may spell disaster for our PAH patients. The Supreme Court is on the verge of reversing half a century of legal precedent that has protected a woman’s right to choose. At the same time, several states have … [Read more...]
Sotatercept for Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension
For the past 30 years, all our pulmonary arterial hypertension medications were described as vasodilators: First prostanoids (epoprostenol), then endothelin receptor antagonists (bosentan, ambrisentan, macitentan) and PDE5 inhibitors (sildenafil and tadalafil). These medications work through different mechanism but all lead to the vasodilation or … [Read more...]
How Am I Doing? Assessing Your PAH.
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...]
Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension Research
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...]
Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension Life Expectancy & Survival Rates
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...]
