Sometimes pivotal events can be identified in the history of a disease that mark the borders of different eras in the diagnosis or treatment. One of these pivotal events in the history of pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) was the publication in 1996 of the paper of Barst et al. (1) on continuous intravenous epoprostenol therapy for primary pulmonary hypertension. For the first time, a medic...

D espite the progress that has been made in the field of pulmonary hypertension (PH) [1–3], there is no unifying and globally accepted definition of the condition. The first official haemodynamic definition of PH was proposed at the First World Symposium on Pulmonary Hypertension which took place 1973 in Geneva, Switzerland as a World Health Organization (WHO)-sponsored meeting [4]. This confer...

Epidemiological studies have established that fenfluramine, D-fenfluramine, and aminorex, but not other appetite suppressants, increase the risk of primary pulmonary hypertension (PH). One current hypothesis suggests that fenfluramine-like medications may act through interactions with the serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine [5-HT]) transporter (5-HTT) located on pulmonary artery smooth muscle cells ...

Pulmonary arterial hypertension is a condition characterized by an increase in mean pressure the pulmonary artery. This pathology associated with high mortality, and specific therapy for does not affect cause of disease extremely expensive. In this regard, it especially important to study modifiable etiological factors hypertension. One such factor drugs. leading groups drugs-inductors anorexig...

T he term whistleblower comes from the phrase ‘‘blow the whistle’’, which refers to a whistle being blown by a policeman or a referee to indicate an activity that is illegal or a foul [1]. Recently, whistleblowers have disseminated valuable information to the community through new media outlets, such as WikiLeaks. In medicine, whistleblowers serve to shed light on side-effects of drugs and, occ...

When Paul Wood first described primary pulmonary hypertensionl 2 he believed it to have a vasoconstrictive origin and showed that the pulmonary vascular resistance could be selectively lowered in some but not all of these patients by infusion of acetyl choline into the pulmonary artery3 in contrast to patients with the Eisenmenger syndrome, who were invariably unresponsive.34 The pathogenesis h...