Why the study?
Do calcium channel blockers provide long-term benefit in patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension?
Do calcium channel blockers provide long-term benefit in patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension?
Calcium channel blockers offer significant long-term survival benefits only to a small, specific subset of pulmonary arterial hypertension patients who show a dramatic initial response to vasodilators.
Reinforces selective vasodilator testing to identify rare long-term calcium channel blocker responders in PAH; leaves open need for prospective validation.
Calcium channel blocker (CCB) therapy continues to be an element of modern pulmonary arterial hypertension treatment guidelines. However, the true number of patients that can be effectively treated with CCBs is very small. It is important to remember that those who truly retain a long-term benefit are those that tend to have a dramatic initial response to vasodilators and will attain normal or near normal hemodynamics and functional class after starting CCBs. Should a patient do so, they may well enjoy dramatic long-term survival on this regimen. In this article we discuss details and experience with calcium channel antagonists.
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Schilz et al. (2017) studied this question.
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