Recapping Highlights from the Third World Symposium on Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension, Venice, Italy, June 23–25, 2003

As the broad range of topics suggests, the Third World Symposium on Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension (PAH) addressed many of the issues of overriding importance to clinicians involved with treatment of the disease. Held in Venice, Italy, from June 23 to 25, the symposium attracted key opinion leaders from Europe and the United States whose research has put them on the frontier of advances in PAH. The symposium assigned topics to various task forces that met and worked toward a consensus document for key issues, such as appropriate diagnostic algorithms, functional capacity tests, and the use of echocardiography and other noninvasive tests.

The summaries presented in this issue highlight many of the trends observed by task force members in Venice and suggest future directions for research in PAH. The World Symposium on Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension has helped formulate definitions and classifications that contribute toward an improved understanding of the pathophysiology of PAH and have produced algorithms that help guide treatment strategies. A list of the task force members follows along with the topics assigned to them.