SUMMARY
Right heart catheterisation is crucial for confirming the diagnosis of pulmonary hypertension, especially in more rare disease subclasses. Right heart catheterisation enables us to measure pressure in pulmonary arteries, define hemodinamics and wedge pressure, which helps us differentiate between precapillary and postcapillary pulmonary hypertension. Furthermore, we perform vasoreactivity testing and fluid challenge testing during right heart catheterisation in selected subsets of patients. Although echocardiography is much more accessible and less invasive investigation, it can only serve us with probability of existence of pulmonary hypertension, yet we always need right heart catheterisation to confirm the diagnosis. Pulmonary hypertension covers a broad spectrum of disease subclasses, which are linked to various ilnesses, most commonly left heart disease and pulmonary diseases. Rare disease subclasses are pulmonary arterial hypertension and chronic thrombembolic pulmonary hypertension. These subclasses are effectively treated with pulmonary hypertension specific drugs and specific procedures such as pulmonary endarterectomy or pulmonary baloon angioplasty when indicated in chronic thrombembolic pulmonary hypertension, which all drastically improve prognosis and quality of patients’ life. Therefore, the diagnosis must be set firmly, always with the use of right heart catheterisation. In september 2018 we started to weekly perform right heart cateterisations at the Department for Pulmonary diseases and Allergy, University Medical Centre Ljubljana, for diagnosing and follow up of patients with rare sublclasses of pulmonary hypertension and prior to listing patients for lung transplantation.