Dear Desiboy,
I’m not sure why your primary doctor requested the echocardiogram, so it’s difficult to interpret this information in the absence of what is going on with your son. This is why I encourage primary care providers to send their patients with whom they are not comfortable to a cardiologist instead of ordering a test that may find something they don’t know what to do with. It appears that this echocardiogram may have been performed by an adult cardiologist’s office, which is also part of the problem here.
Pulmonary hypertension is high blood pressure across the lungs. It is a rare finding in children, but can happen. There are many reasons for it to occur, which I will not list here. I cannot be sure that your son actually has pulmonary hypertension, though. The way that we noninvasively estimate right-sided pressures is to measure it from the Doppler velocity of the tricuspid valve regurgitation jet. Because the report says that the jet is only “trace,” I cannot be sure that the measurement was not an overestimation of the jet. We now have a finding that may or may not be real and may have nothing to do with the reason that he was referred for the study in the first place. At this time, what I would recommend that you do is to see a pediatric cardiologist and get this evaluated correctly and completely, as opposed to trying to do this through your primary care provider.
I am an adult cardiologist. This is a question for a pediatric cardiologist. Good luck!!!
Dr. Frank J. Pearl, M.D.