New drug tested in Boston offers room to breathe for PAH patients [Video]

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently approved a breakthrough treatment, which was tested in Boston, for people with a rare but often deadly lung disease called pulmonary arterial hypertension.Like many patients, Mike Bennett said the drug has already had a dramatic impact on his life.Diagnosed with PAH more than two decades ago, he remembers when he felt the first symptoms.”I was playing basketball and I was bicycling and doing all the things I wanted to do when, suddenly, I couldn’t,” he said. “And my condition was getting worse.”As Bennett quickly discovered, PAH causes blood vessels in the lungs to become narrower, blocked or destroyed.The damage slows blood flow, forcing the heart to work even harder.”They gave me three years to live without severe medical intervention,” Bennett said. “At the time, that was a lung transplant or a heart-lung transplant.”But so far, Bennett has avoided both.Instead, he’s moved from one …