Editorial urges deeper focus on heart-lung interactions in pulmonary vascular disease

A new editorial published in Comprehensive Physiology underscores the critical importance of understanding heart-lung interactions in pulmonary vascular disease (PVD). Tim Lahm, MD, a pulmonologist and researcher at National Jewish Health, along with a team of esteemed colleagues from institutions across the country, urges the scientific community to confront the major knowledge gaps that hinder progress in improving patient outcomes.

The editorial, titled “Towards a Better Understanding of Heart-Lung Interactions in Pulmonary Vascular Disease,” serves as a call for papers for an upcoming special issue of Comprehensive Physiology dedicated to this topic.

“We’ve moved beyond the idea that pulmonary hypertension is simply a lung disease,” said Dr. Lahm. “The survival and well-being of patients depend not only on how we treat the lungs, but also on how the heart—particularly the right ventricle—adapts, responds or fails under pressure. The future of patient care lies in unraveling these cardiopulmonary dynamics.”

Drawing from a wide range of recent research, the editorial explores how the heart and lungs function as a tightly coupled unit—what the authors call a “right atrium-right ventricle-lung vascular unit.” Dysfunction in one often exacerbates problems in the other, with systemic effects that extend beyond the thorax to the kidneys, liver, brain, skeletal muscle and more.

The editorial highlights growing evidence that pulmonary hypertension, traditionally viewed as a lung-centric disorder, is actually a systemic disease marked by two-way connections among multiple organs. The authors call for an expansion of research to explore novel signaling pathways, mechanical stressors and even emerging model systems—such as heart- and lung-on-a-chip technologies and computational approaches—that can simulate real-world cardiopulmonary conditions with greater precision.

The authors issue a call for papers for basic, translational and clinical research exploring these heart-lung interactions in PVD. This request includes investigations into molecular mediators, disease phenotyping, and innovative diagnostic and therapeutic strategies tailored to sex, age, disease stage and systemic factors.