Pan African Pulmonary hypertension Cohort Study

Pulmonary Hypertension (PH) is a devastating, progressive disease, with increasingly debilitating symptoms and, usually, shortened overall life expectancy due to narrowing of the pulmonary vasculature and consecutive right heart failure. The epidemiology of PH in Africa and the distribution of its multitude of aetiologies have not yet been described, but limited reports suggest that the incidence of PH in Africa is higher than that reported from developed countries, owing to the pattern of diseases prevalent in the region.

It is within this context that the Pan African Pulmonary Hypertension Cohort (PAPUCO) study was established in 2011 via the University of Cape Town. PAPUCO is an African multinational multicentre registry-type cohort study tailored to resource-constraint settings to describe disease presentation, disease severity and aetiologies of PH, comorbidities, the diagnostic and therapeutic management, and natural course of PH in Africa. Descriptions of the objectives and methods of the PAPUCO, the largest contemporary cohort study of pulmonary hypertension in Africa have been described in detail in a previous report (Thienemann, BMJ, 2014).

View the full manuscript: PAPUCO-15-JAN-15.pdf