A conference on the Diagnosis and Treatment of Pulmonary Hypertension will be held in Colorado from 9/13 to 9/16/90. This is the fourth in a series of Grover Conferences on the Pulmonary Circulation. The proceedings of prior meetings, which have considered basic science topics, have been published either in Chest (1985) or the American Review of Respiratory Disease (1987 and 1989). The conference is organized as a workshop with 37 speakers and chairs. Equal time is given to presentations and discussion. All the speakers listed in the program have agreed to participate. The conference has two main goals. The first is to reappraise the methods used to make the diagnosis of pulmonary hypertension. We will determine whether the diagnosis can be made earlier and whether less familiar approaches, such as positron emission tomography, cine CT or endothelial function studies, can improve the detection currently achieved by doppler and echo studies. In order to better understand the early ventricular changes associated with pulmonary hypertension, which may be helpful in diagnosis, several talks will focus on the relationship between the function of the ventricles and changes in pulmonary vascular compliance and impedance. The second goal is to find means to improve the treatment of pulmonary hypertension. The topics chosen were selected either because there is new information available about the pathophysiology of a disease, which might lead to more logical therapy, or because treatment found to be effective in one form of pulmonary hypertension might be worth testing in another. The information developed at this conference will be disseminated as a book, rather than in a journal, because the presentations are in many cases the summation of clinical experience, rather than the results of circumscribed experiments which could be published as original data. This application requests funding for the lodging of the speakers and the use of the conference facility only.
