eveable wrote:At the SUNY yesterday, Dr. Siskin displayed a slide that clearly showed that one third of the patients he treated experienced very significant symptom improvements (most often involving cognitive, heat sensitivity, and balance and coordination issues), one third experienced slight improvement, and another third experienced no improvement whatsoever. The doctors did note that treatment efficacy didn't appear to be dramatically better or worse across the different "flavors" of MS (RRMS, SPMS, PPMS), although one of the doctors (in all honesty, I can't remember which one) did say that he saw some very good results in SPMS patients.
Regarding restenosis: Dr. Sinan, who is leading the Kuwaiti effort to treat as many of their MS patients with the liberation procedure as possible, has made significant use of balloons much larger than those used by other physicians, and has forgone the use of stents (due in large part to the orders of his government). He did state that aggressive balloon angioplasty procedures largely negated the need for the use of stents, and was quite adamant that treating valves in the lower part of internal jugular veins cleared up most of the problems seen higher up in those same veins. The other two presenting physicians were more open to the use of stents, but only after balloon angioplasty had failed repeatedly to open narrowed areas of the veins in question. The general consensus seemed to be that the use of stents should be considered a last resort, but that their safety and efficacy profiles appeared to be well within acceptable parameters.
eveable, not to be unpleasant, but if you are going to lift entire passages directly out of my blog, an attribution would be nice...
If the above passages interested readers, you can find the entire post here:
http://www.wheelchairkamikaze.com/2010/ ... osium.html
bretzke, Siskin's sample size was well over 100 patients. The improvements were seen both immediately after liberation and over a period of time after the procedure.
I believe the same can be said for the Bulgarian group...