Dear friends and colleagues,
the new year has just started, and we still wish you all a healthy, successful and happy new year 2020!
It is foreseeable that the year 2020 will bring us many exciting new developments, study results and activities in the fields of pulmonary hypertension / right heart failure as well as acute and chronic pulmonary embolism.
In late 2019, the WG was actively involved in the updated ESC guidelines on Pulmonary Embolism, led by Prof. Konstantinides (Mainz), which were presented at ESC 2019 in Paris. Furthermore, the WG offered a serial webinar entitled “Pulmonary Hypertension 2019: a roadmap for cardiologists”, that was very well attended and received. In part 1, Prof. Gibbs (London) and Prof. Galiè (Bologna) focused on the diagnosis (“Stage 1 – Driving from symptoms to diagnosis of PH”) and management (“Stage 2 – Moving from diagnosis to management of PAH”) of PH. Part 2 focused on CTEPH (“Stage 3 – A compass to treatment options for chronic thromboembolic PH”, presented by Prof. Lang; Vienna) and PH associated with left heart disease (“Stage 4 – Road blocked ahead! Do’s and don’t’s in PH due to left heart diseases”; presented by Prof. Vachiéry; Brussels). Based on the positive experience, the high attendance, and the excellent feed-back, the WG is currently preparing another serial webinar, which will focus on acute and chronic pulmonary embolism. Current activities also include the writing of an ESC Consensus Paper on “Hemodynamic assessment in pulmonary hypetension”.
In this edition of the newsletter, we highlight a recent paper entitled “Activated Endothelial TGFβ1 Signaling Promotes Venous Thrombus Nonresolution in Mice Via Endothelin-1: Potential Role for Chronic Thromboembolic Pulmonary Hypertension” by authors Bochenek et al., that contains important novel insights on the pathobiology of CTEPH. Please see the detailed comment provided by Prof. Klok (Leiden).
Although it is still early in the year, we are already preparing the ESC congress 2020 in Amsterdam, where we will have multiple prearranged sessions on PH, RV failure and PE. In addition, we strongly encourage members from our working group to submit abstracts in order to present their work at ESC 2020. As in the past, the WG will offer young researcher awards for the best selected abstracts. Please keep the deadline for abstract submission (February 14th) in mind.
On behalf of the Working Group Nucleus
Stephan Rosenkranz
Chairman of WG
Our mission: To reduce the burden of cardiovascular disease.