Echocardiographic Screening Methods for Pulmonary Hypertension: A Practical Review

Pulmonary hypertension (PH) is a debilitating condition defined as mean pulmonary arterial pressure (mPAP) ≥ 25 mmHg. The importance of impaired right ventricular (RV) hemodynamics is increasingly being recognized in treatment of patients with PH. In World Health Organization Group 1 patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension, upfront combination therapy has recently been proposed to improve long-term survival. Also, the mPAP in Group 2 and 3 PH patients has been shown to be strongly associated with clinical outcomes. Thus, screening and monitoring of RV hemodynamics are becoming increasingly important. The gold standard for measuring RV hemodynamics is right heart catheterization (RHC). Although RHC can obtain the most accurate results, it is invasive, cumbersome to patients, and often associated with complications, making it unsuitable for a screening or monitoring modality. Echocardiography is useful in estimating hemodynamic parameters that can be obtained from RHC. Accordingly, the role of echocardiography in evaluating such patients with PH is becoming more important. In this article, we review practical echocardiographic methods in approximating RV hemodynamics for PH.