What therapy is available for patients with primary pulmonary hypertension?
Doctors can choose from a variety of drugs that help lower blood pressure in the lungs and improve heart performance in many patients. Physicians now know that patients with PPH respond differently to the different medications that dilate or relax blood vessels and that no one drug is consistently effective in all patients. Because individual reactions vary, different drugs have to be tried before chronic or long-term treatment begins. During the course of the disease, the amount and type of medicine also may have to be changed. To find out which medicine works best for a particular patient, doctors evaluate the drugs during cardiac catheterization. At present, about one-quarter of patients can be treated with calcium channel-blocking drugs given orally. Intravenous prostacyclin is a vasodilator. It helps patients who don’t respond to treatment with calcium channel blockers given by mouth. It’s continuously delivered by a portable, battery-operated infusion pump. Despite this complexit
