Continuous cardiac monitoring in a patient with terminal pulmonary hypertension and eventual bilateral lung transplantation

As pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) progress, arrhythmias are becoming an increasingly prominent phenomenon. Supraventricular tachycardias have been shown to have an incidence of up to 35% in pulmonary hypertension. Continuous cardiac monitoring was deployed in a patient with severe PAH 100 days before bilateral lung transplantation (BLTX). Despite being graded as WHO functional class IV, no arrhythmias were observed before BLTX. Furthermore, the case describes clinical improvement, along with a significant increase in heart rate variability (HRV) and decrease in night-time heart rate in the post-transplantation period. No arrhythmias were observed preoperatively during continuous monitoring in a 100-day period despite the patient’s intrinsically high risk for arrhythmias. Increasing HRV and lower resting heart rate were observed after BLTX. Since these parameters correlate with the clinical condition, they might be valuable in risk assessment in patients with pulmonary hypertension.