Relax. Let the fact that you've woken up to a cold shower just wash over you.

With British Gas Home Care Cover, you can get your boiler repaired again and again.

And an annual service is included too.

Repeat our mantra. Home Care.

Such British Gas Home Care Cover. See website for turns.

Well, hello, hello, I'm Nersmo and this is the Straight A Nursing Podcast where I teach concepts and share tips on how to thrive in nursing school and beyond at the bedside.

So today we're talking about pulmonary hypertension, which is a condition in which there are high pressures within pulmonary circulation.

Before we dive into our topic, let's start off with three stat facts.

So one, while you'll hear that there is absolutely no cure for pulmonary hypertension and only treatments available to manage the condition, there are actually two possible cures.

One is a long transplant and the other is a surgical procedure that could be curative in a certain type of pulmonary hypertension.

We'll talk about that in this episode.

Number two, pulmonary arterial hypertension or group one pulmonary hypertension is rare and affects only between two and eight people per million worldwide.

It's still an awful lot of people though that suffer from this condition.

And number three, pulmonary hypertension is very difficult to diagnose.

An accurate diagnosis of pulmonary hypertension can take years.

One study showed a third of people diagnosed with pulmonary arterial hypertension waited more than two years for a diagnosis, while another 25% waited almost three years.

Alright, so now that I've got you intrigued to learn more about pulmonary hypertension, let's dive into a brief overview and a bit about the pathophysiology.

So in normal cardiopulmonary circulation, blood flows easily through the vessels of the lungs.

It's a low pressure system. So blood's going to flow really easily through there.

While it's flowing through the lungs, it participates in gas exchange, offloading carbon dioxide and picking up oxygen.

However, pathologic changes to pulmonary vasculature lead to vasoconstriction, endothelial dysfunction, smooth muscle hypertrophy, thrombosis, and or vascular remodeling.

And the result is that blood flow through the pulmonary vessels is decreased or even occluded in some cases, which causes pressures to increase leading to pulmonary hypertension and increased pulmonary vascular resistance.

...