Northern Pulmonary Hypertension: A Forgotten Kind of Pulmonary Circulation Pathology

Abstract

Northern pulmonary hypertension (NPH) is a medical condition that is still enigmatic in non-Russian-speaking countries. The extant previous literature is mostly available in the Russian language and, therefore, not accessible to the rest of the world. The recent increased interest in climate changes and environmental effects on pulmonary circulation prompted us to summarize the knowledge from the past about the effects of cold on pulmonary vasculature. In this review, we, for the first time, describe, in detail, the pathological attributes of human NPH, a medical disorder that occurs in people living in extremely cold regions, in the English language. Briefly, NPH is characterized by the hyper-muscularization of the pulmonary arteries and de novo muscularization of the arterioles with the ultimate development of right ventricular hypertrophy. However, the profound molecular mechanisms of the NPH pathology are to be revealed in future comprehensive studies.

Keywords

• pulmonary hypertension
• pulmonary circulation
• cold environments
• Russian North
• polar regions
• pulmonary vasculature