Transcript
Announcer:
You’re listening to Clinician’s Roundtable on ReachMD. On this episode, we’ll hear from Dr. Brandy McKelvy, who is a Professor of Medicine in the Divisions of Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine at McGovern Medical School at the University of Texas at Houston. She’ll be talking about the groups most at risk for pulmonary arterial hypertension. Here’s Dr. McKelvy now.
Dr. McKelvy:
Some of the presenting symptoms that patients have are shortness of breath at rest, fatigue or shortness of breath with exertion, and any degree of low oxygen saturations at rest or, again, with exertion. If your oxygen level is getting low, that can be of the early signs of pulmonary hypertension. Easy exercise fatigue, like not being able to get across a grocery store or your own house or pick up your kids from school, may be an early sign. A dramatic rise in your heart rate, suddenly, without any other explanation, might be a sign.
Then there's the whole category of diseases that are known to be associated with pulmonary arterial hypertension, which means that during your lifetime with these diseases, you may go on to develop pulmonary hypertension. And we need to be looking at those patients. Those would be different than the idiopathic, which means we're idiots, and we don't know what's wrong or why you have it. So there's certain genetic defects, and usually if you have other people in your family or a familial association with PH, those tend to get picked up pretty easily, because we're looking for those patients.
But there's a whole group of autoimmune diseases that are known to be associated with PH during your lifetime. So if you have lupus, scleroderma, or what's called mixed connective tissue disease, those are the patients that we will annually screen for the development of pulmonary hypertension, because they're at risk for developing it. Other known associated subsets of patients are people with what's called portopulmonary disease, or liver disease that can go on to develop pulmonary hypertension. HIV, treated or untreated. Anybody that had a corrected congenital heart defect can go on to develop pulmonary hypertension. And then a huge burden that we're seeing in the United States recently is people that use methamphetamines are at risk for developing pulmonary hypertension.
So those are the groups that we would be looking for.
Announcer:
That was Dr. Brandy McKelvy explaining which patient groups are at risk for pulmonary arterial hypertension. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit Clinician’s Roundtable on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!