PULMOEAST: A Comprehensive Analysis of Pulmonary Hypertension in Eastern India

BeatKing, Known As Club Godzilla, Dies At 39 From Pulmonary Embolism

Houston-based rapper BeatKing, also known as Club Godzilla and Justin Riley, has died at age 39. He ... [+] reportedly fainted during a recording session and was rushed to a hospital, where he was found to have a pulmonary embolism. (Photo by Paras Griffin/Getty Images)

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Houston-based rapper BeatKing, also known as Club Godzilla and Justin Riley, has died at age 39. He reportedly fainted during a recording session and was rushed to a hospital, where he was found to have a pulmonary embolism. And unfortunately pulmonary embolisms can kill quickly.

BeatKing first achieved broader attention when his single "Crush" essentially crushed it and went viral in 2010. But arguably his biggest hit was "Then Leave" which not only went viral on social media in 2020 but also didn't leave Billboard's Bubbling Under Hot 100 chart for a while, making it all the way to Number Three. BeatKing's work included collaborations with 2 Chainz, Bun B, T-Pain and Ludacris.

A pulmonary embolism is a medical emergency. It's not the type of thing that you can simply walk off or use vapor rub to treat. It is when a blood clot travels to and blocks an artery that supplies blood to your lungs. Such a clot most often originates in one of the deep veins of your leg, hence the name deep vein thrombosis or DVT for such a clot when it first forms. But less commonly the clot can come from elsewhere in the body.

Your lungs are kind of important because they allow you breathe and do all the gas exchange stuff, being the place where oxygen gets into your bloodstream and carbon dioxide gets removed from your red blood cells to then be blown out of your mouth and nose. In blocking a pulmonary artery, a pulmonary embolus prevents blood flow to the portion of the lung supplied by that artery, which is clearly not good.

When your lung tissue doesn't get blood flow and thus oxygen, like any body tissue, it will soon die unless blood flow is quickly restored. Also, when enough pulmonary artery blood flow is blocked by a clot or clots, the pressure in the pulmonary artery can build up more and more. That causes your heart to work even harder to push blood through this higher pressure. If this pressure gets too high, eventually, your heart will essentially say, "Can't do this anymore" and fail.

These are the reasons why a pulmonary embolism can be life threatening. So be aware of any symptoms that may be suspicious for a pulmonary embolism. The most common ones are sudden unexplained shortness of breath, chest pain or fainting. Other possible symptoms include a cough producing bloody mucus, a rapid or irregular heartbeat, lightheadedness or turning blue. Yeah, turning blue doesn't tend to be an everything-is-fine thing.

Treatment then is to keep your blood as oxygenated as possible, while trying to get rid of the blood clots and keep more clots from going to the lungs. The doctor may administer clot-dissolving medications or use an invasive procedure to remove the clots. He or she will also typically start blood thinners to prevent more clots from forming. Time is of the essence. The sooner the treatment, the more likely you are to survive the pulmonary embolism.

Of course, just because you get short of breath reading all of this doesn't necessarily mean that you have a pulmonary embolus. Again the key is that the symptoms are not explainable by something like increased physical activity or worry. Also, know whether and when you may be at increased risk for DVTs or other blood clot formation.

Blood tends to clot when it stops moving. That's what allows your wounds to stop bleeding, which is a good things. But every good thing has it's flip side. Anything that slows the flow of blood can increase the risk of blood clotting. For example, physical inactivity can make it more likely for blood to pool in your legs and thus form DVTs.

There are also conditions that make it more likely for clots to form in general. This includes clotting disorders, heart disease that slows the flow of blood, blood vessel problems that disrupt the flow of blood, kidney disease, Covid-19 and certain cancers or medications. Surgery can make your blood more likely to clot for a while afterwards, typically for the first two or three months after getting general anesthesia. Oh, and there's smoking. Yep, add increasing blood clot risk to the long list of reasons not to smoke.

It's not clear what risks BeatKing may have had for blood clots. Sometimes the reasons for the blood clots are clear. Sometimes they are not. Regardless, unfortunately, pulmonary embolism took BeatKing's life at the relatively young age of 39.

Jupiter Endovascular Receives FDA Approval For U.S. Pivotal Study Of Vertex Pulmonary Embolectomy System Using Endoportal Control

MENLO PARK, Calif., August 29, 2024--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jupiter Endovascular, Inc., a medical technology startup developing a new class of endovascular procedures using Endoportal Control™ to bring the precision and control of direct surgical access to catheter-based interventions, announced today that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved its Investigational Device Exemption application for the SPIRARE II U.S. Pivotal study (NCT06576427).

The pivotal trial will study the Vertex Pulmonary Embolectomy System, which incorporates Jupiter's novel Endoportal Control™ platform technology into an innovative endovascular procedure intended to treat Acute Pulmonary Embolism (PE) with an unprecedented level of control and precision. Endoportal Control™ is designed to bring these benefits to a variety of catheter interventions, with the goal of enabling interventionalists to deliver treatment to anatomical sites that they cannot safely or easily reach with a conventional endovascular approach. The endoportal device is delivered in a flexible, relaxed state over a guidewire to the target location in the vasculature, pressurized with saline to fix it in a stable position for therapeutic delivery, then relaxed again to navigate to another target location or for removal.

SPIRARE II is a prospective, single-arm, multicenter pivotal trial that will enroll up to 145 patients with acute, intermediate-risk PE treated with the Vertex Pulmonary Embolectomy System at up to 25 U.S. Sites. Trial endpoints will characterize the procedural and clinical benefits of PE treatment with Endoportal Control™ using the Vertex system, across measures of safety, right heart function, and clinical improvement from the time of the procedure to 30 days post-procedure. SPIRARE II is part of Jupiter Endovascular's SPIRARE clinical program, which also includes the SPIRARE I clinical study evaluating the Vertex system at up to two sites in Europe.

"One of the remaining challenges in treating PE is the ability to safely navigate through the right heart and into multiple areas of the pulmonary vasculature. The act of placing stiff interventional devices across the right heart may add stress to a strained right ventricle, and today's catheters can become difficult to purposefully control beyond the main pulmonary arteries," said Catalin Toma, MD, Director of Interventional Cardiology for the Heart and Vascular Institute at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) and national co-principal investigator for the SPIRARE II trial. "These risks pose a barrier to the widespread adoption of large-bore catheter therapies for PE, creating the need for a procedural system that can safely access the pulmonary arteries with increased control."

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"In open surgery, we have the benefit of being able to directly visualize the anatomy and the instruments with which we are working. This provides surgeons with an excellent level of control and precision," said Joshua Goldberg, MD, Surgical Director of the Structural Heart Surgery Program at Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York and national co-principal investigator of SPIRARE II. "A percutaneous embolectomy system that can provide interventionalists with the control and stability we enjoy in surgery holds the potential to dramatically improve procedural safety, efficacy, and efficiency."

"We are excited about FDA approval of the first pivotal study of a system leveraging our Endoportal Control™ platform technology. In the more than 25 animal studies conducted to-date with the technology, it has demonstrated safe and easy navigation through the heart and vasculature, and effective delivery of test interventions," said Carl J. St. Bernard, Jupiter Endovascular CEO. "Endoportal Control™ has the potential to meaningfully improve many endovascular procedures while enabling entirely new therapies. Our Vertex system for pulmonary embolectomy is the first of what we intend to be a portfolio of our own interventional procedure systems incorporating Endoportal Control™ to treat a variety of cardiovascular conditions that affect millions of patients worldwide."

Pulmonary embolism occurs when a blood clot travels through the bloodstream – often as a result of deep vein thrombosis in the legs – ultimately blocking blood flow to the lungs. It is the third leading cause of cardiovascular death in the Western world, affecting as many as 900,000 U.S. Patients each year and killing 10-30% of them within one month of diagnosis.

About Jupiter Endovascular

Jupiter Endovascular is a medical technology startup developing the "endoportal procedure," a new class of endovascular procedures using Endoportal Control™ to bring the precision and control of direct surgical access to catheter-based interventions. The procedure uses an endoportal device that navigates flexibly through the vasculature via percutaneous access. Once in position, the endoportal device can be fixed into a stable state to deliver an interventional treatment with surgical-like precision and control from an endovascular access point. To learn more about Jupiter Endovascular, visit www.Jupiterendo.Com.

View source version on businesswire.Com: https://www.Businesswire.Com/news/home/20240829311516/en/

Contacts

Michelle McAdam, Chronic Communications, Inc.Michelle@chronic-comm.Com(310) 902-1274

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New Method Predicts Risk Of Pulmonary Embolism In Patients

A hospital in Israel is predicting patients’ risk of suffering pulmonary embolism (PE) — a potentially life-threatening lung blockage and the third most common cause of death from cardiovascular diseases â€" based entirely on Al analysis of their medical records.

The condition is notoriously hard to diagnose because the symptoms â€" typically a sudden difficulty in breathing, chest pains, coughing blood and light-headedness â€" can easily be confused with many other illnesses.

But Sheba Medical Center in Ramat Gan, central Israel, has developed an algorithm that accurately predicts, when a patient is admitted to the hospital, the likelihood of that patient suffering a PE.

PE is primarily diagnosed through a CT scan. The algorithm instead uses only information gleaned from medical records: the patient’s age, sex, BMI (body mass index), past clinical PE events, chronic lung disease, past thrombotic events and use of anticoagulants.

PE happens when a blood clot (thrombosis) â€" usually dislodged from a patient’s legs — travels through the bloodstream and blocks a blood vessel in the lungs. This reduces blood and oxygen flow in the lungs, increases blood pressure in the pulmonary arteries, and potentially damages the heart or lungs.

The research team, writing in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, say late or under-identification of a blood clot in one or more arteries to the lungs seriously threatens patients’ lives and is “a major challenge confronting modern medicine.�

They analyzed data available prior to emergency department admission for 2,568 patients with PE and 52,598 patients in a much larger “control group� in which just 4 percent had PE.

Results from the study showed the algorithm was able to accurately identify and predict which patients were at high risk of PE upon hospital admission, allowing doctors to diagnose and begin treatment early.

"Early and timely diagnosis of pulmonary embolism is challenging, yet crucial, due to the condition’s high rate of mortality and morbidity,� said Prof. Gad Segal, head of the Sheba Education Authority, who conducted the study together with computational development researchers at Ben Gurion University in Beersheva, southern Israel.

“This study highlights the enormous potential of machine learning tools to support innovation in diagnostics. Even though the model only used data available from patients on arrival to the ER, it was still able to predict with high accuracy the likelihood a patient developing PE, a crucial advancement for patient care and outcomes.�

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