Iliac vein stenting leads to “significant long-term improvements” in patients’ quality of life

Rachael Morris (London, UK) talks to Venous News about VEINES QoL/Sym—a venous disease-specific quality of life (QoL) questionnaire for patients with chronic venous insufficiency—as well as the findings of a study which sought to evaluate changes in venous-specific QoL before and after iliac vein stenting for unilateral chronic outflow obstruction.

The baseline VEINES QoL score was 35.6 for the 188 patients included in the study. This improved to 64.8 at six-month follow-up. The VEINES Sym also showed “significant improvement”, notes Morris, with these results sustained at 12, 24 and 36 months. Additionally, the median villalta score at baseline was 14, which improved to nine at six months, 7.5 at 12 months, seven at 24 months and six at 36 months.

The results “demonstrate that the severity of post-thrombotic syndrome and venous disease-specific QoL significantly improve after iliac vein stenting and that these improvements are maintained at long-term follow-up.”

Morris further outlines the importance of QoL assessments and looks at why they have sometimes been underutilised, explaining that disease-specific quality of life assessments are can be "time consuming and complex to administer and score correctly”. Concluding, Morris examines which patients are suitable for venous stenting and emphasises the importance of “more training of interventionalists to ensure that the right patients are being treated to get the best outcomes”.