No, but APRV sugests the patient is shunting or having refractory hypoxemia. No studies show any change in mortality using NO for this condition and we found this to be true in our practice. NO only seems to get the "bang for the big buck" in pulmonary hypertension so use your swan to calc PHTN or get an echo.
Hank, But what if you have a shunting problem along with pulmonary hypertension? It is possible to have multiple pathologies going on at the same time. The patient that I was refering to had both low compliance issues and pulmonary hypertension. The thing I was curious about was due to the long Thigh's of APRV is there any issues with decreased NO to the patient ie a lot of wasted NO.
