Microvascular Disease in Chronic Thromboembolic Pulmonary Hypertension: Hemodynamic Phenotyping and Histomorphometric Assessment.

Background: Pulmonary endarterectomy (PEA) is the gold standard treatment for patients with operable chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension. However, persistent pulmonary hypertension (PH) after PEA remains a major determinant of poor prognosis. A concomitant small-vessel arteriopathy in addition to major pulmonary artery obstruction has been suggested to play an important role in the development of persistent PH and survival after PEA. One of the greatest unmet needs in the current preoperative evaluation is to assess the presence and severity of small-vessel arteriopathy. Using the pulmonary artery occlusion technique, we sought to assess the presence and degree of small-vessel disease in patients with chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension undergoing PEA to predict postoperative outcome before surgery.

Methods: Based on pulmonary artery occlusion waveforms yielding an estimate of the effective capillary pressure, we partitioned pulmonary vascular resistance in larger arterial (upstream resistance [R]) and small arterial plus venous components (downstream resistance) in 90 patients before PEA. For validation, lung wedge biopsies were taken from nonobstructed and obstructed lung territories during PEA in 49 cases. Biopsy sites were chosen according to the pulmonary angiogram still frames that were mounted in the operating room. All vessels per specimen were measured in each patient. Percent media (%MT; arteries) and intima thickness (%IT; arteries, veins, and indeterminate vessels) were calculated relative to external vessel diameter.

Results: Decreased R was an independent predictor of persistent PH (odds ratio per 10%, 0.40 [95% CI, 0.23-0.69]; =0.001) and survival (hazard ratio per 10%, 0.03 [95% CI, 0.00-0.33]; =0.004). Arterial %MT and %IT of nonobstructed lung territories and venous %IT of obstructed lung territories were significantly increased in patients with persistent PH and nonsurvivors. R correlated inversely with %MT (=-0.72, <0.001) and %IT (=-0.62, <0.001) of arteries from nonobstructed lung territories and with %IT (=-0.44, =0.024) of veins from obstructed lung territories. Receiver operating characteristic analysis disclosed that R <66% predicted persistent PH after PEA, whereas R <60% identified patients with poor prognosis after PEA.

Conclusions: Pulmonary artery occlusion waveform analysis with estimation of R seems to be a valuable technique for assessing the degree of small-vessel disease and postoperative outcome after PEA in chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension.