Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) is a condition involving high blood pressure and structural changes in the walls of the pulmonary arteries, which are the blood vessels that connect the right side of the heart to the lungs. Affecting people of all ages and ethnic backgrounds - but most commonly found in young women of child-bearing years - the disease has historically been chronic and incurable, with a poor survival rate. PAH is often not diagnosed in a timely manner because its early symptoms can be confused with those of many other pulmonary and respiratory conditions. Symptoms include shortness of breath, extreme fatigue, dizziness, fainting, swollen ankles and legs and chest pain (especially during physical activity). With proper diagnosis, there are currently several therapies to alleviate symptoms and improve quality of life for PAH patients. The key is to find a PAH specialist and pursue immediate treatment.
A review of COVID-19 studies reveals a troubling connection between two health crises: coronavirus and obesity.
A new Italian study published on the preprint server medRxiv in August 2020 shows that this may not be an adequate explanation, since ARDS is a nonspecific diagnosis. Instead, they say, antemortem lung biopsy shows a “Covid pattern” of acute lung injury, which could guide the application of therapeutics.
Endovascular treatment of vein of Galen aneurysmal malformation (VGAM) in babies with severe pulmonary hypertension can improve chances of survival, according to a study released today at the Society of NeuroInterventional Surgery's 17th Annual Meeting.
When people seek emergency care for shortness of breath, a routine electrocardiogram (ECG or EKG) enhanced by artificial intelligence (AI) is better than standard blood tests at determining if the cause is heart failure, according to new research published today in Circulation: Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology, an American Heart Association journal.
A study led by researchers at the University of Southampton, UK, has identified a novel short isoform of the full-length receptor that severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) uses to gain entry to host cells.
A study recently published in the journal Circulation looks at temporal trends in the burden of comorbidities and associated risk of mortality among patients with heart failure (HF) with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), in which the left ventricle of the heart is not able to relax enough to fill properly with blood, and HF with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF), in which the left ventricle is not able contract enough to pump out as much blood.
When most people think of high blood pressure, they think of being tested with an arm cuff at a doctor's appointment. That type of blood pressure is separate from pulmonary hypertension (PH), which is high blood pressure in the lung arteries.
The aberrant buildup of misfolded proteins is a hallmark of a host of disorders, including neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) is an insidious disease. Symptoms may begin slowly, and even before they appear, extensive damage has caused the obstruction of small arteries leading to increased blood pressure in the lungs.
A new experiment by researchers at the Columbia Engineering and Vanderbilt University may have the solution to this long-standing problem. The team revived and repaired the damaged lungs by cross-circulation support of the whole lungs outside the body using the circulatory system with that of a living pig.
Now, in a new study published on the preprint server, bioRxiv researchers in the U.S. investigated a soluble version of ACE2 for SARS-CoV-2 viral neutralization activity.
Pulmonary hypertension is a serious problem associated with a wide variety of lung diseases, which can lead to right ventricular dysfunction and death.
A Turkish family from a village near the Black Sea first caught the attention of medical researchers in the early 1970s.
The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft is establishing ten new Collaborative Research Centres to further support top-level research in German universities.
A new research paper published in the journal JAMA Network Open in May 2020 reports a high incidence of deep vein clots in patients with severe COVID-19 at a single French medical center. This could indicate the need for systematic anticoagulant therapy in these patients as a preventive measure.
UCI Health will initiate a clinical study of a drug to treat critically ill COVID-19 patients who face a high mortality rate because of acute inflammation that fills their lungs with fluid, a grave condition that even mechanical ventilation cannot improve.
A study conducted by a team of researchers at LSU Health New Orleans has shown for the first time that chronic exposure to inhaled nicotine alone increases blood pressure (hypertension), in both the body's general circulation and in the lungs that can lead to pulmonary hypertension.
The Critical Path Institute (C-Path) today announced that its Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) Consortium has received a letter of support from the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to facilitate the development and validation of the proposed regulatory qualification of pancreatic islet autoantibodies commonly used in clinical practice to diagnose T1D: insulin autoantibodies, glutamic acid decarboxylase 65, and insulinoma antigen-2 autoantibodies as enrichment biomarkers for T1D clinical trials.
COVID-19 disease, caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), is a highly infectious disease. As of today, over 170,000 people worldwide have succumbed to the infection. Reports have shown that some comorbidities and illnesses raise the risk of getting infected and also influence the severity of the disease. Having a compromised immune system can also drastically raise the risk of getting COVID-19.
New guidance is available for physicians who must go through a number of steps to provide a probable diagnosis of sarcoidosis - an inflammatory disease that affects the lungs, lymph glands, and other organs.