Pulmonary Hypertension

Yesterday I mentioned the disease pulmonary hypertension. Today I want to explain a little about this complex disease. Pulmonary hypertension is basically a high blood pressure in the pulmonary system vasculature. It can be in the arteries, veins or capillary beds or a combination of these. Like the high blood pressure that we are all familiar with, this high blood pressure is in the lungs. This makes it difficult for oxygen to get into the blood stream and CO2 to get out of the blood stream. Hence you may become short of breath because your oxygen saturation levels will drop.

These high pressures in the lungs will put high pressures on the heart and result in a heart that fails. But these pressures don't just affect the heart, they also affect the liver and can result in liver failure as well.

While we do have earlier detection these days and we can closely monitor someone with this disease, the survival rate is not great beyond 3 years from the time of the diagnosis.

So if you end up with this disease as a result of a weight loss drug, is it worth losing a few pounds to the total detriment of your health?

Weight Loss Drugs Drawbacks

Lastly, I want to talk about Phenteramine (Adipex, Ionamin). This is one of the more dangerous drugs in terms of the side effects. While it can cause things like an increase in blood pressure, increase in heart rate, diarrhea, anxiety or restlessness, these are not the things to be mostly concerned about. The bigger risk here is the development of a disease called pulmonary hypertension. This is an insideous disease that comes on without any symptoms. Once we discover that it is present, we have very few things we can do to treat it.

This is a lethal complication for you and while losing weight is important, this drug can actually totally rob you of your future health and your future. The risk with this drug is just way too high to even consider using it.