Hospitalizations increase for deadly lung disease

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Looked at one way, a spike in hospital stays for a rare and deadly lung disease is a bad thing.
Or it may reflect progress in diagnosing and treating a disease that has thwarted medical science for at least a century.

Which is it?

"I don't know," says Claudia Stein, a senior research physician at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, who supervised a new study showing the rise in hospitalizations for pulmonary hypertension. Stein says the data didn't explain why it has occurred, though one possibility is that the population is aging and more prone to heart disease.

Whatever the cause, Stein says, the findings are troubling, because pulmonary hypertension is so often fatal. If untreated, about half of patients die within three years.

The disease occurs when there's too much resistance in arteries that carry blood to the lungs from the right side of the heart, typically in patients with heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and pneumonia. In about 1.5% patients, doctors can't identify a cause.

As of Dec. 14, 205 patients with primary pulmonary hypertension were awaiting lung transplants. That makes the disease the most common reason for lung transplantation after scarring from pulmonary fibrosis, according to data from the United Network for Organ Sharing.

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