The Pathology of Pulmonary Heart Disease

Right ventricular hypertrophy has been described in association with a variety of pulmonary disorders. In some of these there is an obvious relationship between the changes in the right ventricle and the severity of the pathological lesions in the pulmonary tissue, but in others it is difficult to find any correlation. The following review of the incidence of pulmonary heart disease in routine post-mortem material attempts to estimate the importance of some of the lesions of the pulmonary vascular tree as a morphological basis for the cardiac hypertrophy. Of 6770 necropsies available for study, 111 showed hypertrophy of the right ventricle secondary to disease of the lungs. In these cases any complicating factor such as essential hypertension, valvular lesions, or coronary vascular disease was excluded. The thickness of the ventricular wall was accepted as the index of hypertrophy, and while the ventricle was 5 mm. or more in thickness in all the cases studied, it was much more than this in the great majority.