Unbiased Phenome-Wide Association Studies of Red Cell Distribution Width Identifies Key Associations with Pulmonary Hypertension

What is it about?

RDW has been associated with severity and prognosis in dozens of disease states, but an unbiased study stratifying RDW-disease associations has not been performed. This manuscript addresses that deficit by providing a framework of RDW-disease associations. That framework provides clinicians with a way to interpret elevated RDW values in the absence of anemia and provides researchers with foundation for future RDW studies. Additionally, the echocardiographic and invasive hemodynamic cohorts analyzed in this manuscript are the largest cohorts ever analyzed for RDW association studies and identify new associations between RDW and cardiac structure and function. Together, these unbiased phenotypic, echocardiographic, and hemodynamic studies reveal novel associations with RDW that advance our understanding of how RDW embodies potent prognostic information.

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