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I found this about scarring after angioplasty. This is for arteries imagine veins which are much smaller.

Angioplasty Had Side Effect / Cheney's artery scarred by November medical procedureMarch 06, 2001|By Ulysses Torassa, Chronicle Medical Writer



Opening a Blocked Artery in the Heart. New York Times GraphicWhile doctors have gotten better at clearing out clogged arteries, keeping them from closing back up remains a stumbling block for a significant number of heart patients, including Vice President Dick Cheney.

"The Achilles' heel of angioplasty and intercoronary stenting is the problem that Vice President Cheney experienced today -- the narrowing related to scar tissue," said Dr. Ralph Brindis, a cardiologist at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in San Francisco and clinical professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco.

About 20 percent of patients develop scar tissue in their blood vessels after angioplasty, a procedure in which a tiny balloon is inserted into the artery and inflated, squashing the built-up plaque that is blocking blood flow.

I'll look for more on this too. That's higher than I would've thought with arteries.

One of the advantages with CCSVI is that it is often valvuloplasty, not venoplasty. This is why there is talk about ballooning the valve but sparing the healthy vein as much as possible.

(Placing the shoulder of the balloon just above the stenosis and the rest of the balloon in the larger vessel below (into the innominate vein) helps limit contact of the balloon with the healthy vein wall.)

Coronary angioplasty is a common medical procedure. Serious complications don't occur often. However, they can happen no matter how careful your doctor is or how well he or she does the procedure. Serious complications include:

Bleeding from the blood vessel where the catheters were inserted.
Blood vessel damage from the catheters.

One of the drawbacks of angioplasty is its tendency towards restenosis. Restenosis is basically a scar formation within the dilated vessel. When the blood vessel is traumatized by the balloon and the stent, it reacts by forming a scar and typically, 20-25% of patients undergoing angioplasty will form a scar within the first six months, which can reblock up the artery.

It is incorrect to say that restenosis equals scarring. There are several forms of restenosis:

Elastic recoil of the vein
Elastic recoil of the valve
Intimal hyperplasia
Clotting
Scarring

The most common form of restenosis is elastic recoil. This is not damage to the veins. In elastic recoil, the vein or valve just goes back to where it was. Valves are resilient, according to Dr. Siskin.

Cece, what I posted here are not my words. I researched and copied and pasted what was written about scarring which seems to be a problem with angioplasty done on arteries, well documented. I did not post the whole articles as they were very long.
If I post something that is my opinion, I will say so.

"Angioplasty cracks open the vessel wall and does a fair amount of damage," said Dr. John Cooke, associate professor of cardiovascular medicine at Stanford University Medical Center.

The scarring from the procedure apparently formed a 90 percent obstruction in one of the blood vessels leading from Cheney's heart -- the same artery that was forced open by angioplasty in November following Cheney's fourth heart attack. Doctors performed another angioplasty on Cheney yesterday, to clear the blockage again.

The renarrowing of a vessel due to scarring from angioplasty is called restenosis. Unlike heart disease, it is not something that patients can remedy by changing their diet or getting more exercise.

"The question patients always ask is: 'Is there something I can do related to risk factor modification?' " Brindis said. "The answer is: not really. The process of renarrowing is basically a biologic, scar-tissue phenomenon."

Still, doctors say significant progress has been made in cutting down restenosis. And some new approaches are promising even better results.

Cheney was the beneficiary of one advance -- the use of stents to keep blood vessels propped open following angioplasty. Used routinely for the past decade, the tiny mesh tubes have cut the rate of restenosis by about half, Brindis said.

More promising are two approaches familiar to oncologists fighting cancer.

One is radiation. Brindis said two companies recently won approval from the Food and Drug Administration for techniques that use small amounts of radioactive substances to prevent cells in the blood vessel from growing abnormally.

I see three problems with this:

First we cannot equate veins with arteries. Arteries are high flow with thick walls. Veins are low flow and more delicate.

Second we cannot equate CCSVI with coronary arterial disease. In the most common presentation of CCSVI, the blood vessel walls are healthy; it is the valves that are unhealthy. This makes it easier to treat the valve without damaging the vein. In coronary arterial disease, the artery itself is unhealthy and there is plaque present, which is absent in CCSVI.

Third there are no links being shared with the original research. The example of Dick Cheney is a case study of one man with a particularly bad heart.

STOP ATTACKING EVERYTHING I POST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You are feeling attacked.

I am feeling frustrated. Misinformation is dangerous. We have so little information on CCSVI as it is.

STOP THIS.

I am sorry, dania, I am not intimidated by you.

I had a friend who recently was confused about this. She assumed because she had restenosed that it was scarred. She also assumed that because I had restenosed and was retreated that I had scarred. But I had not. There are many types of restenosis.

Here is the factual error in what you posted:

Restenosis is basically a scar formation within the dilated vessel.

Cece wrote:I am sorry, dania, I am not intimidated by you.

I had a friend who recently was confused about this. She assumed because she had restenosed that it was scarred. She also assumed that because I had restenosed and was retreated that I had scarred. But I had not. There are many types of restenosis.

Here is the factual error in what you posted:

Restenosis is basically a scar formation within the dilated vessel.

Here you can write to them and tell them you got it wrong
http://www.cardiacspecialists.com/cardi ... zation.htm

dania
you are simply posting about arteries, when this whole forum is about veins. hence the argument, when really, there is nothing to attack.

esta wrote:dania
you are simply posting about arteries, when this whole forum is about veins. hence the argument, when really, there is nothing to attack.

I tried to find info with angioplasty and veins. Did not have any luck. There really nothing out there. I THINK angioplsty was first used on arteries. Zamboni being a vascular doctor PROBABLY thought if it could be done on arteries it could be done on veins. One would think that if there are risks with this procedure on arteries, veins also might display the same risks.