Key result
Various animal models are available to simulate pulmonary hypertension due to left heart disease, though none perfectly recapitulate the human condition.
Why the study?
No direct treatments exist for PH-LHD and no single animal model exactly recapitulates human disease, making the selection of appropriate models essential for basic and translational research.
This review provides a comprehensive overview of available animal models for studying pulmonary hypertension due to left heart disease, highlighting their utility and limitations for basic and translational research.
No current PH-LHD animal model fully recapitulates human disease; leaves open development of improved models for translational research.
Pulmonary hypertension due to left heart disease (PH-LHD) is regarded as the most prevalent form of pulmonary hypertension (PH). Indeed, PH is an independent risk factor and predicts adverse prognosis for patients with left heart disease (LHD). Clinically, there are no drugs or treatments that directly address PH-LHD, and treatment of LHD alone will not also ameliorate PH. To target the underlying physiopathological alterations of PH-LHD and to develop novel therapeutic approaches for this population, animal models that simulate the pathophysiology of PH-LHD are required. There are several available models for PH-LHD that have been successfully employed in rodents or large animals by artificially provoking an elevated pressure load on the left heart, which by transduction elicits an escalated pressure in pulmonary artery. In addition, metabolic derangement combined with aortic banding or vascular endothelial growth factor receptor antagonist is also currently applied to reproduce the phenotype of PH-LHD. As of today, none of the animal models exactly recapitulates the condition of patients with PH-LHD. Nevertheless, the selection of an appropriate animal model is essential in basic and translational studies of PH-LHD. Therefore, this review will summarize the characteristics of each PH-LHD animal model and discuss the advantages and limitations of the different models.
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Liu et al. (2022) conducted a review in Pulmonary hypertension due to left heart disease (PH-LHD). Various animal models are available to simulate pulmonary hypertension due to left heart disease, though none perfectly recapitulate the human condition.
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