Penn Pulmonary Hypertension/Pulmonary Vascular Disease Program

Pulmonary vascular diseases can greatly affect your quality of life. This group of diseases, including pulmonary hypertension, cause high blood pressure in the lungs and can damage the heart. This can cause symptoms like severe breathlessness and limit your ability to do the things you love.

Pulmonary hypertension is a specific type of pulmonary vascular disease, typically caused by common conditions like congestive heart failure (CHF) or emphysema. Our pulmonary hypertension program is one of the first and largest programs of its kind in the United States. Our physicians and nurse practitioners are among the best in Philadelphia, and have extensive experience in diagnosing, evaluating and treating pulmonary vascular disease. We can help create the treatment plan that is right for you.

Treatments include:

• Oral, inhaled and intravenous (pump-infused) medications. These new classes of drugs have just become available in the last two decades. We are well versed in how to use and combine them to best effect and how to minimize the side effects.
• Thromboendarterectomy for patients whose pulmonary hypertension is caused by small blood clots in the pulmonary artery. Our surgeons specialize in this complicated procedure.
• As your disease evolves, our multispecialty heart failure and advanced lung disease teams offer a complete continuum of care, including mechanical circulatory support options.
• We work closely with our heart and lung transplantation teams for those whose condition progress to this stage. The Penn Transplant Institute has an extraordinary history and has performed over 1000 lung transplants.

Improving Quality of Life for People with High Blood Pressure in the Lungs

The Pulmonary Hypertension/Pulmonary Vascular Disease Program at Penn offers the most effective treatments available to improve your pulmonary hypertension and even reverse some of the damage to the lungs and heart.

Until recently, patients with pulmonary hypertension had very few options for the management of their disease. Today, we are at the forefront of research and patient care, offering revolutionary options to treat and manage pulmonary hypertension.