Cases of Pulmonary Hypertension Grow in Children

September 20, 2015 By Andrea K. McDaniels of The Baltimore Sun

At 3 months old, Gabrielle John’s daughter would wake up gasping for air and sweating profusely. Baby Stella’s heart rate was also much higher than normal.

“Her little body was working so hard to do anything,” John said.

After several emergency trips to different hospitals, doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital finally diagnosed Stella with pulmonary hypertension, a potentially fatal condition in which blood pressure is abnormally elevated in the arteries of the lungs. These pulmonary arteries narrow, causing the heart to work harder to pump blood through the lungs to collect oxygen and possibly leading to heart failure.

While the disease is uncommon in children, researchers from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine have found that more and more kids are being hospitalized for the disease, driving up medical costs by hundreds of millions of dollars. The researchers are pushing for development of a registry — essentially a comprehensive national database — to get a better handle on the disorder in hopes of improving diagnosis and treatment.