Stent Treatment for CVI

Dec 192009

Chronic Venous Insufficiency

The deep veins of you body are designed to return blood from the extremities back to the lungs and heart ready for re-circulation. This function is assisted by a pump process formed by your calf muscles. When the muscles contract, they force blood up through the vein. The blood is then stopped from flowing backwards by a series of valves (The diagram shows valves working correctly). If the valves are damaged, blood is able to travel in both directions and the vein is said to be Refluxive.

: Image via Wikipedia

In addition to this, the cause of the valve damage is often a blood clot or DVT. If the vein is still blocked by a clot then it is even more difficult for the blood to flow through the vein towards it’s destination.

These particular circumstances result in a condition called Chronic Venous Insufficiency (CVI). The result is a set of symptoms including pain, heavy legs, skin discolouration etc.

Stent Treatment

Removal of refluxive veins is impossible and the attempt is not allowed. There have been attempts to re-build damaged valves but the surgery is complex, expensive, not widely available and often unsuccessful. However, a paper published on http://www.vascularweb.org by Seshadri Raju describes the team’s unexpected results of using less invasive Stent Treatment.

A Stent is basically a man made tube. In this case it is positioned to allow blood to flow around or through an obstruction. Their paper can be found here.

Hope

With luck this treatment option will be investigated further. It reads to me like treatment of existing sufferers may even be possible. Of course, it does not treat the valves, only the residual clot or obstruction. So it can only offer a partial solution, but even partial symptom reduction would make a massive difference to my life. I’m sure I’m not alone!