Clinical Usefulness of Response Profiles to Rapidly Incremental Cardiopulmonary Exercise Testing
Figure 9
Time course of end-tidal partial pressure for carbon dioxide () during incremental exercise and early recovery in a healthy control (panel (a)) and five patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension of progressing severity (panels (b) to (f)). Note that becomes lower and even fails to increase as disease progresses. Moreover, it frequently increases (instead of diminishing) during recovery. Panel (f), in particular, depicts a severely impaired patient showing abrupt and sustained decrease in concomitant with the opening of a forame ovale (Figure 8). Unl is unloaded pedaling.
