Ok Bob, Thnks fr thinking of it! I appreciate it very much!
It is in with the stuff we were talking somewhere back 15 pages or more ago with the decreased perfusion in the MS brain.
They demonstrated lower levels of deoxyhemoglobin which means the brain was not being able to remove as much 02 as it should from the hemoglobin as it goes by in the circulation, but overall they showed that deoxyhemoglobin can be used as a contrast agent with MRI in the technique. Generally it is thought that the inflammation of the vessels slows the perfusion down but this ccsvi model has more of a "backup" angle to it instead to acount for that
It might be possible to show that something like the "Liberation 100" were using oxygen better after treatment? I wonder. So do the liberation proceudre then do these scan studies to see if it made a difference in 02 utilisation. tht might show a difference much more rapidly than some other checks a person might do, like waiting to see if lesions got smaller. That might take years or never happen, but maybe the oxygen utilisation would change more quickly than that.
The name of the paper is
Ge, Y et al "Diminished Visibility of Cerebral Venous Vasculature in Multiple Sclerosis by Susceptibility Weighted Imaging at 3.0 tesla". Journal of magnetic resonance imaging 29:1190-1194 (2009)
Yes PKboo It's a weird situation. Your hand must be wonky like mine! Heya sista!
But even though we go to neuro's there is no good reason for them to be aware of it yet because there is no treatment yet. Like they could refer us to get dopplers but if they did the doppler guy and the neuro would then be stuck what do they do with this iformation? There's no approved treatment yet.
There MIGHT be a way for an aggressive patient to work around that--let's say Cheer--who got a doctor who already agrees that he will treat, --AHEM! -- vasculr headaches. I am pressing my guy to do something but so far he is still cogitating, and I actually think that's what most people would get if they tried to get someone to do dopplers.
So making doctors more aware is not going to help us YET!
But one year from now Dr Zamboni will release the results of the Liberation procedure. if it works well this conversation will be different because with 100 patients (even insurance covered revimmune has fewer than that many documented treated patients) so the size of that study works greatly in our favor. Additionally it will be proven to everyone that all of those patients HAD a stenosis...because they did surgery on these said stenoses. So all of a sudden the end of questions about "do MS patients have stenoses" the answer to that will be yes, at least some of them do, and then we can individually make the case that we want dopplers and venograms.
my dopplers BTW were only $505. About the same cost as ONE WEEK of copaxone.