PAH-SDB: A Prospective Multicenter Cohort Study of Sleep-Disordered Breathing, Nocturnal Physiological Phenotypes, and Longitudinal Outcomes in Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension
Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) is a progressive pulmonary vascular disease characterized by increased pulmonary vascular resistance, right ventricular dysfunction, and clinically important morbidity and mortality. Sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) and sleep-related hypoxemia are common in patients with PAH, but their prevalence, physiological determinants, longitudinal trajectories, prognostic significance, and potential role in individualized management remain incompletely defined. PAH-SDB is a prospective, multicenter, observational patient registry enrolling adults with right-heart-catheterization-confirmed World Health Organization Group 1 PAH at pulmonary vascular centers across China. Participants will undergo standardized nocturnal sleep and cardiorespiratory monitoring together with comprehensive PAH assessment, including clinical characteristics, functional status, biomarkers, echocardiography, hemodynamics, treatment, and outcomes. Selected participants may undergo additional polysomnography, cardiac magnetic resonance imaging, wearable monitoring, repeated sleep assessments, or biospecimen collection when available and ethically approved. The registry will characterize the prevalence and phenotypes of sleep-disordered breathing and nocturnal physiological abnormalities; examine their relationships with PAH severity and right ventricular-pulmonary vascular function; determine their value for predicting clinical worsening, hospitalization, transplantation, and mortality; evaluate longitudinal changes in sleep physiology in relation to PAH treatment and disease trajectory; and develop and validate multimodal statistical and artificial-intelligence models for phenotyping, risk prediction, and treatment-response stratification. Clinical management will remain at the discretion of treating physicians, and the registry will not assign PAH or sleep-related therapies.
• Age ≥18 years at enrollment.
• Diagnosis of WHO Group 1 pulmonary arterial hypertension established by right heart catheterization using contemporary hemodynamic criteria: mean pulmonary artery pressure \>20 mmHg at rest, pulmonary arterial wedge pressure ≤15 mmHg, and pulmonary vascular resistance \>2 Wood units, with clinical classification consistent with Group 1 PAH.
• PAH etiology may include idiopathic, heritable, drug/toxin-associated, connective-tissue-disease-associated, congenital-heart-disease-associated PAH after appropriate clinical classification, portal-hypertension-associated PAH, HIV-associated PAH, or other recognized Group 1 PAH subtypes.
• Clinically stable enough to undergo overnight sleep/cardiorespiratory monitoring, as judged by the treating team.
• Able and willing to provide written informed consent and participate in longitudinal follow-up.
• Enrollment at a participating center with availability of the required baseline PAH dataset and a technically interpretable protocol-standardized sleep recording.