Pregnant with pulmonary arterial hypertension – Can we handle the pressure?

Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) predominately affects women and is characterised by progressive obliterative pulmonary vascular disease that, even in the face of medical therapies, continues to cause right heart failure and death for many. They compared outcomes in patients who developed PAH during their first pregnancy (n = 108) versus those that developed PAH during their second pregnancy (n = 48). In contrast, an earlier review found that primagravidae suffer a higher risk of death, postulating that patients who had prior successful pregnancies likely had lesser PAH disease and hence lower complication rate with subsequent pregnancies [[1]]. [Extracted from the article]