Ric Ruhl was inducted into the Michigan High School Football Coaches Association Hall of Fame merely two months before he passed away. His friends knew he was struggling with his health, but his constant athleticism and community involvement assuaged their concerns.

The modest mentor was honored to receive recognition in the Hall of Fame. “As an assistant, he wondered if he was deserving. But when it happened, he had a big ol’ smile on his face,” said fellow coach John Blankenship.

But not much later, Ric died of primary arterial hypertension at age 60. He kept the severity of his problem from most people at the high school where he taught for 36 years. “He had difficulty breathing,” Blankenship said. “He struggled with it more than people knew.”

Even in the wake of his death, Ric’s students and team are keeping a positive outlook to honor their deceased friend. They remember him as someone who would always reach out to interact with everyone in the community. “Aside from the wins and losses, the big thing with Ric was the relationships he made with the players. That’s what he was all about. That’s what coaching is all about,” Blakenship added.

“This school, this program, this community was very fortunate to have that kind of person in Ric. He was a good person and a good coach. More important, he was a good friend.”

A new study suggests that an FDA-approved cancer drug provides benefits to patients with pulmonary hypertension.

In a matter of just four months, many trial participants with pulmonary hypertension were able to increase their exercise capacity after taking Nexavar. Nexavar is currently used in the U.S. to treat kidney and liver cancer.

According to a Reuters article, “Eight out of the first nine patients who took the drug saw improvements in their ability to exercise, and six out of nine had significant improvement in their right ventricular ejection fraction, which measures the heart’s ability to pump blood to the lungs. Four patients had decreased pressure in their pulmonary artery, which supplies blood to the lungs.”

Patients reported feeling so good that many elected to continue taking Nexavar once the 16-week trial had ended. The participants were taking Nexavar in addition to their usual hypertension treatment drugs.

Researchers plan to launch a new study with 40 or 60 participants. They believe the success of Nexavar may be linked to the similarities between cancer and pulmonary hypertension: both cause the production of new, unwanted cells. In the case of pulmonary hypertension, these new cells clog the arteries leading to the lungs.

Click here for the full article.

In New Delhi recently, Dr. Venugopal became the oldest physician to perform surgery at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. Dr. Venugopal and his team stitched a hole in the heart of a one-year-old boy suffering from pulmonary arterial hypertension.

George Sajeed’s body had started turning blue when doctors took immediate action. According to the doctors, George’s heart condition resulted in excess blood to flow to the lungs, causing repeated and constant bouts of pneumonia. For his age, George’s weight should be around 26 pounds, but he weighs a mere 13.

“Ideally, the measure of pulmonary hypertension should be one-fifth of the body’s blood pressure, but in this child, it was equal to his blood pressure, which is very dangerous,” said one of the surgeons.

Now, George will be able to live a normal, stable life because of the heart repair surgery. For more information, click here.

A heart-lung transplant patient is taking an aggressive stance against the disease that put her on the operating table.

It was a strange coincidence when Professor Julia Polak was diagnosed with a condition she had been investigating: pulmonary hypertension. Now, 12 years after her transplant, she continues to research means of healing damaged lung tissue. Julia founded the Imperial College Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine Centre in London, where she teaches and studies the causes, symptoms, and treatments of pulmonary hypertension and other conditions.

Her current investigation is focused on stem cells and lung tissue; Julia is developing a way to apply stem cells to damaged lung tissue so that they may replace the compromised cells. The biggest obstacle seems to be finding the right stem cells and properly priming them so that they grow into lung tissue.

Polak’s aim is to get so good at this that it will be possible to grow large quantities of stem cells in the lab, sufficient to have enough to hand for transplant into patients with lung disease.

To read more about her research, click here.

An Oklahoma woman is being remembered this weekend at the second annual ‘Flying for a Cure’ festival.


Katie Hill was only 30 years old when she died in December of pulmonary arterial hypertension. She left behind three children and a husband when she passed away suddenly. It remains a mystery how Katie developed PAH; there was no family history of the disease, and she had never used Fen-Phen diet pills. In fact, her condition was never deemed critical enough for her to be added to a transplant list. The disease progressed too rapidly, but doctors estimate that only a double lung and heart transplant could have saved her.

Katie was diagnosed with PAH in 2005. “I’d sit down on the couch and my heart was racing,” Hill said in a 2006 interview with The Edmond Sun. “I felt I had just run a mile.”


Flying for a Cure is the second annual fundraiser sponsored by the Oklahoma Pulmonary Hypertension Support Group to raise funds for biomedical pulmonary hypertension research and awareness. Katie and her mother co-founded the Oklahoma Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension Support Group in 2006. The family event will include kite flying demonstrations and a kite decorating contest for children. There will be refreshments, clowns and inflatables, belly dancing, music, a silent auction and door prizes.


“This particular kite festival is being held in her memory,” said Katie’s mother. “It was her desire to definitely keep this going. We’ve got to find a cure.”

There are many independent risks factors for pulmonary arterial hypertension. In a recent study, researchers revealed that HIV/AIDS may significantly increase the risk of developing PAH.


In the past, it was believed that the human herpes virus has a direct effect on a person’s likelihood of developing PAH; this study, however, shows that there is no evident link between herpes and PAH. Instead, the presence of HIV may increase the risk of PAH.


Many patients with HIV also have the human herpes virus, so it was difficult to unravel the relationship between those two factors and PAH. Due to the prevalence of the human herpes virus in the HIV-positive population and the relatively poorly-studied link between HIV infection and pulmonary arterial hypertension, a research team based at San Francisco General Hospital compared rates of pulmonary arterial hypertension in HIV-positive patients and HIV-negative controls.


They found that the pulmonary artery systolic pressure levels in the HIV-positive group were 5.1 units higher than the levels in the HIV-negative group. This puts the HIV-positive patients at a much higher risk of developing PAH. Other than the presence of HIV, age was the only variable affecting the pulmonary pressure levels.


The researchers found that the human herpes virus had no significant effect on pulmonary pressure levels, indicating that herpes may not be a risk factor for PAH. To read the complete findings, click here.

PulmoBioTech, Inc. recently purchased more stock in PulmoScience, Inc., increasing its holdings to 61% of PulmoScience. This purchase is significant because PulmoScience has been developing a unique molecular imaging system for the diagnosis of pulmonary complications, including hypertension.

CEO of PulmoBioTech stated, “We are confident the Molecular Imaging technology, developed and owned by PulmoScience, will dominate the market for the diagnosis of Pulmonary Embolism and Pulmonary Hypertension, and as such, with the company moving towards Regulatory Approval for Phase I Human Trials, we felt that this was the right time to increase our stake in the company.”

PulmoBio’s move represents confidence in the imaging technique and a promise that it will make great changes in the way pulmonary hypertension is approached and diagnosed. The technique, currently called PulmoBind is non-invasive and, so far, very effective. The process involves administering a certain type of molecule into the patient’s circulatory system, and then using a Gamma Camera to create an image of the arteries.

The full release can be read here.

For some, this past Sunday–Mother’s Day–was the chance to do something exceptional for mom. But the three Trujillo sisters do something exceptional for their mom every day.

Yvonne Trujillo suffers from primary hypertension and has become dependent on her daughters to survive. They bathe, clothe, and feed Yvonne on a daily basis. Yvonne is only 38 years old.

She first noticed symptoms at work, but they were brushed away as asthma. As time went on, however, Yvonne’s difficulty breathing increased. She traveled to Denver for a second opinion, where she was diagnosed with primary hypertension.”It came out of nowhere. I never smoked, never did drugs,” Yvonne said. “I was working at the Wal-Mart Distribution Center and going to school at night to get my CDL (commercial driver’s license) to drive trucks. I started getting dizzy, I was out of breath a lot and my leg started swelling up, so I went to the doctor.”

Following the news, her daughters dropped out of high school to care full time for their mother. “I was going to Los Lunas High School, but when [my mom] started getting worse I didn’t want to get that scary phone call that said she was in an emergency room,” one daughter said.

The girls are responsible for bringing their mother to appointments states away, but in the mean time they are working to earn their GED diplomas. Yvonne is on the waiting list for a lung transplant and is hoping to purchase a wheelchair-accessible van soon.

To read the rest of the Trujillo story, click here.

United Therapeutics, introduced a few posts back, has just announced that they will be presenting information on their drug treprostinil at the meeting of the American Thoracic Society in Ontario this month. Treprostinil is used to treat primary arterial hypertension.

UT and its wholly-owned subsidiary Lung Rx will discuss the four paths of administration for treprostinil. On May 21, following the meeting, UT will host a Q&A session for investors. This development reflects a significant advancement in PAH treatment availability and methods.

Jodie Dewey’s love of art and culture was contagious. “She was one of those people that just lit up a room. She loved art, and she taught her students to love it, too,” colleague Mary England said.

This week, students and faculty from Greenville High School in Michigan will pay tribute to the deceased art teacher, who passed away last week. She had been hospitalized since April 9, when doctors diagnosed her with primary pulmonary hypertension. Jodie had undergone gastric bypass surgery last June and had not been in good health since, but the PPH diagnosis and her subsequent death were nevertheless a surprise. Fellow staff said Jodie was frequently tired, but no one knew until recently that her exhaustion was attributed to a heart problem.

“Ms. Dewey saw beauty in everything. Her robust laugh will live in our hearts forever,” Principal John Gates said. She would have turned 49 this week. For more details, click here.