Things I Found on PHA's Website
What Tests Will My Doctor Do To Tell If It's PH?
This week I wanted to answer a question posed on the PHA Message Board. I found an answer, and so much more. This week's "Thing I Found" is "What Tests Will My Doctor Do To Tell If It's PH?," an excerpt from "Pulmonary Hypertension: A Patient's Survival Guide" that has been made available on the website.
There are so many tests, so many new terms, and the diagnostic procedure will vary from doctor to doctor so even if you ask others on the message board, you might need more answers to your questions about the diagnostic procedure for PH.
This page covers, in plain and easy to understand language, tests such as "Vasodilator study," "Right-heart catheterization," "Polysomnogram," and "Pulmonary function tests." You may understand the testing you went through, or will soon be going through, but it might be difficult to explain the tests to your loved ones. This page can help.
The question on the message boards that inspired this week's feature is: "Can you have normal saturations and still be short of breath? And if so, how?"
Here is a quote from the page I am featuring today:
At the PHA conference in 2002, a patient asked a panel of doctors why, when she was well saturated with oxygen, she was still short of breath. The doctors said that although a lack of oxygen can make you short of breath, shortness of breath is usually related more to right-heart failure and cardiac output than to how much oxygen is bound to the red blood cells. For example, when you start climbing a flight of stairs, even if your blood is "fully loaded" with all the oxygen it needs, the blood stream doesn't deliver the oxygen to where it is needed in time to prevent breathlessness.
So much information is packed into this page. Best of all, it is written for us.
Resource Link: What Tests Will My Doctor Do To Tell If It's PH?
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I welcome suggestions! Please send them to me at pha@PHAssociation.org. If you have a particular interest or need for info on any PH-related topic, please suggest it to me and I'll locate the resources on the site. If I can't locate information for your topic, I'll know what to suggest for additions to the website. If you have found something on the website to be particularly helpful please suggest that as well.
Kathryn Frix
Online Community Liaison
Pulmonary Hypertension Association
