Transcript
Announcer:
This is Clinician’s Roundtable on ReachMD. Today, Dr. Ali Ataya will be walking through challenges and unmet needs in pulmonary arterial hypertension care. Dr. Ataya is a Professor of Medicine in the University of Florida Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine, as well as the Director of the Pulmonary Hypertension Program and the HHT and Rare Lung Disease Program. Let’s hear from him now.
Dr. Ataya:
A lot of patients still suffer with PAH despite treatment. And a lot of our colleagues over the years have developed many different tools that we use in everyday practice to risk stratify our patients. The goal is to move them from high risk, or the red, down to low risk, or the green.
But some patients, despite multiple pathways of medications, still do not fall into the low-risk category and have residual aggressive disease. And these are the patients that require multiple treatments, access to the healthcare system, and even a transplant in some cases. And I think, despite these advances, we continue to struggle with early detection of this illness. We have great screening tools, access to echocardiograms, and more awareness, but a lot of patients still get delayed in the diagnosis. And we still see patients who present to us extremely ill, or what's considered high risk—or even in heart failure—by the time they present to centers.
And a lot of these treatments carry a heavy burden on patients and their families. One of the more advanced therapies that we give are intravenous therapies, where patients are connected to a pump that runs 24/7. And you can imagine these catheters, these pumps, come with risks such as infections and complications, and they can affect their lifestyle and everyday life. So that's another aspect of this disease. Newer drugs may hopefully help prevent patients from going on these intravenous therapies or help them get off them, and we can open up the door in improving their quality of life.
Like any other aspect of medicine, there are underrepresented groups that are overlooked sometimes. We're talking about our older patients who have comorbidities or even our very young patients that may be misdiagnosed asthma or other conditions before their disease progresses.
So all of these play a role in areas that we need to focus on to help improve this illness in this space.
Announcer:
That was Dr. Ali Ataya talking about how we can improve pulmonary arterial hypertension care. 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!