MS not caused by narrowed neck veins, Canadian study finds

Sheryl Ubelacker, The Canadian Press Published Tuesday, October 8, 2013 5:11PM PDT Last Updated Tuesday, October 8, 2013 7:09PM PDT

TORONTO -- A long-awaited Canadian study has found that narrowed neck veins are as common in healthy people as those with multiple sclerosis, sounding what's being called the "death knell" of the theory that blocked blood vessels may cause the debilitating neurological disease.

The study, published Tuesday in The Lancet, is the latest to question the validity of a controversial theory put forth in 2009 by Dr. Paolo Zamboni that MS is related to narrowed neck veins, which prevent blood from properly draining from the brain.

The Italian vascular surgeon named the condition "chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency," or CCSVI. He suggested iron deposits from backed-up blood cause the lesions in the brain that are the hallmarks of MS. The disease causes inflammation that destroys the myelin sheath around nerves, leading to widespread disability.

Zamboni said patients treated with a procedure to open up their neck veins -- called balloon venoplasty -- saw a significant reduction in symptoms.

News of Zamboni's "liberation therapy," generated through traditional and social media, sent thousands of MS patients from Canada and elsewhere to private clinics around the world, where they spent thousands of dollars each for the unproven treatment.

In the Lancet study, researchers at the universities of British Columbia and Saskatchewan found CCSVI was a rare phenomenon: out of 177 MS patients, unaffected siblings and healthy volunteers, only one in each group was found to have CCSVI as defined by Zamboni.

"And this was a big surprise to all of us," said Dr. Anthony Traboulsee, medical director of the UBC Hospital MS Clinic, who headed the study. "We were really expecting to find many more people with this feature."

What they did find, however, was that at least two-thirds in each group -- so both those with MS and those without MS -- had a 50 per cent or greater narrowing in a jugular or other neck vein.

Among 79 subjects with MS, 74 per cent had neck vein narrowing, while the same was true for 66 per cent of 55 unaffected siblings and 70 per cent of the 43 healthy volunteers.

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MS not caused by narrowed neck veins, Canadian study finds