Transthoracic Echocardiography in Pulmonary Hypertension: Easy Tool, but Caution is Needed!

Screening high-risk individuals for pulmonary hypertension (PH) usually begins with transthoracic echocardiography (TTE) as the first-choice test for noninvasive pulmonary vascular hemodynamic status evaluation. Therefore, echocardiography can provide comprehensive information on heart morphology, ventricular function, and valve abnormalities.

Echocardiography is also a useful tool for estimating the systolic pulmonary arterial pressure (sPAP), right ventricular (RV), and right atrial (RA) pressures to assign an echocardiographic parameter of the probability of PH. Most often, the tricuspid regurgitation jet velocity (TRJV) is measured by TTE and, together with an estimate of the right atrial pressure (RAP) based on the inspiratory collapse and the size of the inferior vena cava, the TRJV jet is used to estimate the systolic pulmonary artery pressure (sPAP).

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