[Pulmonary hypertension due to tumor embolism]

We report a 46-year-old woman with a metastatic breast cancer who developed a subacute pulmonary hypertension. The final diagnosis was microscopic pulmonary neoplastic emboli. She presented with the typical clinical picture of a pulmonary hypertension with a normal pulmonary angiographic computer tomography and multiple sub-segmental perfusion defects on radionuclide imaging. This serious condition must be known by physicians, because of an opportunity to obtain the diagnosis by the cytologic analysis of sampled microvascular blood obtained with a pulmonary artery catheterization. The prognosis is poor and there is no efficient therapy.