The long awaited new ESC/ERS guidelines on the diagnosis and treatment of pulmonary hypertension was presented during the annual ESC (European Society of Cardiologists) Congress in Barcelona from the 26th of August to 29th of August.

The Task Force (TF) on the new guidelines made an enormous effort in the last two years to update the previous guidelines which was published in 2015. This was the very first time that patient representatives were involved in such a review and I am happy to let you know that PHA Europe was part of this work! We could work closely together with key opinion leaders of the field and were truly handled as partners in this whole process: we participated countless Zoom meetings, were part of hundreds of email exchanges, ran a presentation about the importance of patient empowerment to the TF members, commented on the draft paper and provided the draft text for the “patient associations and patient empowerment” section.

The new guidelines contains many novelties, such as:

• new haemodynamic definition of PH
• updated PH classification
• New diagnosis algorithm
• expanded and fine tuned risk-stratification table (four-strata risk assessment for follow-ups)
• recommendation for the management of PH-LHD group
• updated CTEPH therapeutic algorithm
• patient-reported outcome (PRO) measures
• new section on patient associations and patient empowerment

The new guidelines is available from here.

A new lay summary was compiled for the very first time to facilitate the better understanding of the guidelines which is available from here.

An interesting and personal feeling about the work in the TF can be found here.