None listed
Conditions
Brief summary
Contemporary Australian data suggest that pulmonary hypertension (PHT) is more common than previously reported and confers a poor prognosis, however this single-centre data needs confirmation in a large population study from many locations and diverse backgrounds. Identification of underlying cause and prognosis of PHT non-invasively using simple markers would have a major impact on the diagnosis and management of patients with PHT. PHT is often identified during echocardiography, performed for investigation of breathlessness. PHT is not a diagnosis in itself, but has a number of underlying causes that require additional investigation to delineate. Such causes include left heart diseases, various chronic respiratory illnesses, and chronic thromboembolic and pulmonary vascular diseases. Over 900,000 echocardiograms (echos) are performed in Australia each year, but to date there has been no systematic method for capturing data from these echos. The newly developed National Echo Database Australia (NEDA) is designed to obtain measurement and report data, but no images, from digital echo laboratory across Australia and transfer them to a secure database, matched against national mortality data. The NEDA database will be the largest echo database in the world. Identification of the population of patients with PHT is of great importance, both to target those who may benefit from disease-specific therapy, and to better understand all forms of PHT in Australia and New Zealand. Abnormalities identifiable using echocardiography may be very useful prognostic indicators, and may help separate various causes for PHT. This information could be used to both identify patients who may respond to treatment, and to identify them earlier, with the goal of decreasing both morbidity and mortality for this common condition.
Interventions
No intervention. Measurements and text interpretation information performed as part of a standard echo examination are collected from a backup copy of the echo database at each lab. The duration of the observation is from the first echo ever entered into the clinical database at the lab until the last echo entered when the backup database was taken. This time interval varies among each laboratory in Australia, and is dependent on when digital echocardiography was installed in the laboratory, and
No intervention. Measurements and text interpretation information performed as part of a standard echo examination are collected from a backup copy of the echo database at each lab. The duration of the observation is from the first echo ever entered into the clinical database at the lab until the last echo entered when the backup database was taken. This time interval varies among each laboratory in Australia, and is dependent on when digital echocardiography was installed in the laboratory, and may be as long as 10 years. Since NEDA is a real world database, there is no intervention and no change to practice with NEDA.
Sponsors
NEDA Limited
Eligibility
Sex/Gender
All
Age
18 Years to No maximum
Healthy volunteers
No
Inclusion criteria
Participants will be considered those who have undergone echocardiography at one of the participating centres in accordance with standard clinical practice.
Exclusion criteria
Individuals under the age of 18 will be excluded from the study and those who withdraw their consent. There are no other exclusion criteria for participants involved in the study. Individual data points may be excluded if a clause is present in an echo study suggesting that image quality was insufficient for accurate diagnostic imaging to be performed.
Outcome results
None listed