Three Things Everyone Should Know About Pulmonary Hypertension

Pulmonary hypertension can be a rare condition but it can be managed, especially if you get a timely diagnosis. While high blood pressure is quite common, pulmonary hypertension is rare but it can also be deadly. 

When you’re diagnosed with this condition, it means there is a strong force of blood passing through the sides of your arteries, so you can have a stroke and heart attack. This page explains some things everyone should know about pulmonary hypertension. 

It seems that physiological changes may enhance the development and progression of pulmonary hypertension. This condition is diagnosed when the average blood pressure that leaves your arteries on the right side of your heart is at least 25 mmHg or more. However, it’s unknown what triggers the chain of events to start pulmonary hypertension, but many experts understand how it progresses. 

It all starts with the reduction of the blood vessels to cause the changing of the vessel walls. So as these walls of these vessels thicken, space where the blood goes through narrows to increase the pressure. As the condition progresses, this pressure continues to increase, but the heart’s right ventricle fails to pump blood against this high pressure.

While the condition gets worse, you tend to experience breathlessness and you can become very tired. Some people even have heart palpitations when they are exercising. 

Whether it’s a heritable or idiopathic form of pulmonary hypertension, more women get it than men, especially those who are between the ages of 30 and 60 years old. 

Although no one knows why women are more susceptible to it than men, experts believe that it may be associated with estrogen. This means changes such as hormonal ones that happen during pregnancy and autoimmune issues which can be common in women can be associated with pulmonary hypertension in women. Its prognostic implications in pregnancy can lead to severe implications.

Think about this, you may visit a general practitioner, a specialist for asthma, then other specialists, before seeing a cardiologist or pulmonologist who can diagnose pulmonary hypertension. It’s not surprising that it can sometimes take even a year before you get the right and final diagnosis. 

Remember that your doctor needs to rule out all other types of medical conditions. Thankfully, nowadays there is an improvement in the timeline for diagnosing pulmonary hypertension because more doctors now understand what this condition is all about and how to identify it. 

Because pulmonary hypertension is very rare. common symptoms of pulmonary hypertension include breathlessness which is associated with other conditions. So many doctors may usually conduct testing for other conditions like congestive heart failure and asthma. As a result, it can sometimes take a while for you to be diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension.

Hence, once your doctor suspects that you have pulmonary hypertension, they may ask for a series of tests that may involve an exercise tolerance test, a chest X-ray, and a pulmonary function test.