The many faces and outcomes of pulmonary vein stenosis in early childhood

Abstract

Pulmonary vein stenosis is a rare and poorly understood condition causing obstruction of the large pulmonary veins and of blood flow from the lungs to the left atrium. This results in elevated pulmonary venous pressure and pulmonary edema, pulmonary hypertension, potentially cardiac failure, and death. Clinical signs of the disease include failure to thrive, increasingly severe dyspnea, hemoptysis, respiratory difficulty, recurrent respiratory tract infections/pneumonia, cyanosis, and subcostal retractions. On chest radiograph, the most frequent finding is increased interstitial, ground-glass and/or reticular opacity. Transthoracic echocardiography with pulsed Doppler delineates the stenosis, magnetic resonance imaging and multislice computerized tomography are used for further evaluation. Interventional cardiac catherization, surgical techniques, and medical therapies have been used with varying success as treatment options.

Keywords: catheter intervention; pulmonary hypertension; pulmonary vein stenosis.