Chronic Thromboembolic Pulmonary Hypertension clinical trials at UCSD

The goal of this observational patient registry is to learn how expert centers treat patients with chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension (CTEPH). CTEPH is a condition in which blood clots block the blood vessels in the lungs. There are currently three treatment options for patients with CTEPH: - surgery to remove blood clots from large vessels in the lungs (pulmonary endarterectomy (PEA)) - the use of a small balloon to unblock smaller blood vessels (balloon pulmonary angioplasty (BPA)) - drugs Patients can also receive a combination of these treatments. The main question this registry aims to answer are: - How many patients receive a given kind of treatment? - How do expert centers combine the different treatments? - Are patients doing better after they receive a given kind of treatment? - How many patients are alive 1, 3 and 5 years after they receive a given kind of treatment? Participants will receive the same treatments that they would receive if they did not participate in the study. During the study, patients will visit their doctors as they would do normally. The doctors will collect information on the patients' health and enter it into the study database. The follow-up time will be at least 3 years for all patients.

Potential outcomes after PE occur on a spectrum: complete recovery, exercise intolerance from deconditioning/anxiety, dyspnea from concomitant cardiopulmonary conditions, dyspnea from residual pulmonary vascular occlusion, chronic thromboembolic disease and chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension. Although a battery of advanced diagnostic tests could distinguish each of those conditions, the yield of individual tests among all post- PE patients is low enough that routine testing of all PE patients is not typically performed. Although the various possible post-PE outcomes have enormous implications for patient care, they are rarely distinguished clinically. Perhaps for this reason, chronic conditions after PE are rarely (if ever) used as endpoints in randomized clinical trials of acute PE treatment. The proposed project will validate a clinical decision tree to distinguish among the various discrete outcomes cost-effectively through a hierarchical series of tests with the acronym SEARCH (for symptom screen, exercise function, arterial perfusion, resting heart function, confirmatory imaging and hemodynamics). Each step of the algorithm sorts a subset of patients into a diagnostic category unequivocally in a cost-effective manner. The categories are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive, so that each case falls into one, and only one, category. Each individual test used in the algorithm has been clinically validated in pulmonary embolism patients, including the cardiopulmonary exercise test (CPET) technique that the investigators developed and validated. However, the decision tree approach to deploying the tests has not yet been validated. Aim 1 will determine whether the SEARCH algorithm will yield concordant post-PE diagnoses when multiple reviewers independently evaluate multiple cases (reliability). Aim 2 will determine whether the post-PE diagnoses are stable, according to the SEARCH algorithm, between the first evaluation and the subsequent one six months later (validity).