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Pulmonary Hypertension
What is it?
Pulmonary hypertension is high blood pressure in the lungs. Blood coming from the heart to the lungs can't flow out easily.
Thickened muscles in the walls of blood vessels in the lungs make it hard for the blood to flow out.
In the heart, oxygen-poor blood flows from the right ventricle to the lungs. The blood is pumped through the pulmonary arteries and then into smaller and smaller blood vessels until it reaches the capillaries.
Capillaries are thin-walled blood vessels near the small air chambers of the lung. In the lungs, the blood picks up oxygen, and then flows to the heart's left side, where the left ventricle pumps it to the rest of the body.
The blood vessels have muscles in their wall that change their shape to allow more or less blood flow. With pulmonary hypertension, the blood vessels in the lungs have an increased amount of muscle in the walls and the right ventricle has to pump harder to get the blood into the lungs.
Because it's working harder, the right ventricle gets bigger and thicker — and could fail.
There are two kinds of pulmonary hypertension — primary, in which the cause is unknown, and secondary, in which the cause is known.
Causes of secondary pulmonary hypertension can include some birth defects that direct more blood to the pulmonary artery which causes an increase in the pressure.
How is it treated?
There is no cure for pulmonary hypertension. There are many treatments that can relieve some of the symptoms and slow the progress of the disease.