Vasuki Rajam1, Kalapana Devi Agirimangalam Kathaperumal2, Usha Hemant3, Narayanan Rajavelu4
BACKGROUND
Chronic venous insufficiency presents with a spectrum of clinical features ranging from pain or heaviness of affected limbs to non-healing ulcers over the lower limbs and usually require some form of surgical intervention, performing direct perforator vein division preferably by subfascial endoscopic perforator ligation surgery for perforator incompetence, as despite aggressive conservative therapy including compression, lifestyle modification and venotonic medications which are of high cost treatment with increased risk of increasing symptoms.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
A prospective longitudinal clinical study of 30 patients selected by systematic sampling method from November 2014 to September 2015 at our institution was conducted to determine the results of subfascial endoscopic perforator vein surgery (SEPS) in perforator incompetence.
RESULTS
For venous clinical severity scoring pre operatively and after 3 weeks post-surgery, the mean for VCSS pre-operatively was 6.66 and a standard deviation of 2.399. The T value was calculated and was found to be 4.9321 and p value of 0.00001(p value less than 0.05 is significant). Similarly for the cases with active ulcer, the size assessment pre-operatively and post-SEPS was again analysed using student t test and the mean ulcer size prior to surgery was found to be 3.3 and standard deviation of 1.984. The T value was calculated and was found to be 1.789009 and a p value of 0.04 (p value less than 0.05 is significant).
CONCLUSION
Our study concluded that favourable and significant ulcer healing rate with improvement and reduction in clinical severity suggests that SEPS plays an important role in surgical management of advanced stages of venous insufficiency.