HISTOLOGIC SPECIMEN FROM PATIENTS WITH PULMONARY-HYPERTENSION WITH PERCUTANEOUS TRANSLUMINAL BIOPSY RESULTS OF ANIMAL-EXPERIMENTS AN CLINICAL-DATA

Pulmonary hypertension is a severe multietiological disease largely re sistant to treatment. Biopsy is often necessary to establish different ial diagnosis. In pulmonary hypertension transbronchial pulmonary biop sy is contraindicated and open lung biopsy is the method of choice. In our paper we report about experimental results in animals and first c linical data on a new biopsy technique (percutaneous transluminal biop sy, PTB) providing access to histology in pulmonary hypertension witho ut the need of surgery. In a subset of animals pulmonary hypertension was produced experimentally. In addition, we carried out the PTB in pa tients with bronchial carcinoma. Our preliminary results demonstrate t hat sufficient material could be gained for the histologic evaluation of pulmonary parenchyma and in pulmonary vessels. No complications hav e been noted so far.