No link between narrowed veins and MS: Canadian-led study

Angela Mulholland, CTVNews.ca Published Tuesday, October 8, 2013 6:31PM EDT Last Updated Tuesday, October 8, 2013 11:49PM EDT

A study published in the British medical journal The Lancet finds that narrowing of the veins leading from the brain -- a condition called CCSVI -- is just as prevalent in patients with Multiple Sclerosis as in people without the disease.

The study, funded by the MS Society of Canada and led by Dr. Anthony Traboulsee of the University of British Columbia, calls into question the controversial theory that MS is caused by or associated with CCSVI, or chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency.

Four years ago, Italian doctor Paolo Zamboni proposed that MS was linked to constricted veins in the head and neck. He provided research that showed that opening the veins with tiny balloons a procedure he dubbed the liberation treatment --could improve symptoms in patients and reduce the number of attacks. Since then, hundreds of patients have sought the procedure and dozens of studieshave been presented-- all with conflicting results.

The Lancet study used ultrasound to examine the veins of 79 people with MS, as well as a procedure called catheter venography. They also looked at the veins of 55 people who were siblingsof the patients, as well as 43 unrelated healthy volunteers.

Traboulsee, an associate professor of Neurology at UBC and director of the MS Clinic at UBC Hospital, says that catheter venography is considered the most accurate, "gold standard" technology for revealing the size and shape of veins. The procedure involves injecting a dye into a vein and then examining the vein through an X-ray.

The research team compared the width of veins between the brain and the heart with a normal reference point taken from below the jaw.

They say they found that at least two-thirds of the 79 MS patients and the two groups of healthy volunteers had veins that narrowed by at least 50 per cent. The differences in rates of venous narrowing between the groups were not statistically significant.

In all, vein narrowing was present in:

Its certainly clear now that the CCSVI or these narrowings are not the cause of Multiple Sclerosis. Theyre just too common to be the cause of Multiple Sclerosis, Traboulsee said during a news conference Tuesday.

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No link between narrowed veins and MS: Canadian-led study