Good news: treatments have significantly increased five-year survival for CTEPH
- Robyn Kalda
- Jul 18, 2025
- 1 min read
Since the 1980s, treatment options for patients with chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension (CTEPH) have increased. This study looked at whether five-year survival for CTEPH patients also improved.
The researchers looked at 834 CTEPH patients, dividing them into early (1980s and 1990s), middle (2000s), and late (2010-2023) eras.
Early era patients received CTEPH therapy only 35% of the time, and 68% survived for five years.
Middle era patients received therapy 64% of the time. 85% survived for five years.
Late era patients received therapy 97% of the time, and 93% survived for five years.
Clearly, CTEPH therapies and the long-term prognosis of patients with CTEPH have improved substantially in recent decades.
The progression from 68% to 85% to 93% five-year survival really underlines how much coordinated care matters for something as specialized as CTEPH. It’d be helpful to see whether age/comorbidity profiles shifted across eras too (since that could make the later era look even more impressive if patients were older/sicker). Mildly random: I was reading this while also juggling everyday stuff like planning a haircut, and StyleLookLab was open in another tab — weirdly, both are about getting to the right “specialist” instead of guessing.
The improvement over decades is awesome to see, but the split by era also makes me think about what “standard of care” will look like 10 years from now — especially if more patients get flagged earlier after PE and routed into CTEPH workups. I’d be interested to know if the paper breaks down outcomes by intervention type (PEA vs BPA vs meds) within the late era. Total tangent, but I was messing around with image style tools recently and stumbled on https://imgg.ai/styles/ghibli — funny how the internet can take you from heavy clinical topics to Ghibli-style art in one tab.
It’s encouraging to see the late-era five-year survival up at 93%, but it also makes me wonder about the remaining gap — is it mostly people who can’t get to specialized centers, or are there biological/clinical subtypes that still do poorly even with today’s full toolkit? The “therapy rate” trend hints access/referral is a big part of the story. Unrelated, but I’ve noticed a similar “getting discovered matters” dynamic in other spaces — hrefgo popped up when I was browsing AI directories and it made me think about how much outcomes depend on finding the right pathway early.
Seeing treatment uptake climb to 97% in the 2010–2023 era is honestly the headline for me — it suggests the system got much better at routing patients to the right options, not just inventing new ones. Do the authors discuss how they handled patients who were inoperable vs. surgical candidates over time? Side note: the “identifier” concept reminded me of a crypto tool I used once for a puzzle, cipher type identifier — totally different field, but the same idea of classifying first so you can treat the problem correctly.
Those survival numbers (68% to 93% across the eras) are huge, especially for a condition people often go years without the right diagnosis. I wonder if the cohort also shows fewer deaths early on after diagnosis in the late era, or if most of the improvement is longer-term management. Random aside: I decompress with little puzzle games sometimes, and https://blockblast.co has been in my rotation — it’s a weird contrast reading about pulmonary hypertension outcomes right after that.