Venous circulation in lower extremities following femoral vein interruption.

Abstract

D URINC: the past fifteen years the operation of femoral vein interruption, originally introduced by Homans, 1 has been used with varying frequency by different clinics for the prevention of pulmonary embolism. Since a broad program of femoral vein interruption a.~ a prophrlactic measure necessarily entails, in many instances, the interruption of veins which are normal, it has been of some interest to evaluate the effect, of this procedure on the venous return frorn limbs which, prior to the procedure, were ostensibly normal. Clinical evaluations of such patients have been rnade.‘MG These evaluations have shown little evidence of damage to t,he venous drainage of the limb provided the interruption had been performed distal to the larger collateral venous trunks in the femoral triangle. The activity of the paGent may, however, decrease greatly following the primary illness for which he was treated, and for this reason reports of such clinical evaluations may not be entirely tenable. Furthermore, bandaging of t,he extremity may be used to forestall edema and thus mask sequelae. The introduction of the walking venous pressure test as a method for the objective evaluation of the efficiency of the venous return is o has prompted us to study, by means of this test, the extremities of a group of patients in whom the operation of superficial femoral vein interruption was performed. The results of the walking venous pressure test in ext,remities in which diseased femoral veins had been interrupted have been reported before.’ The patients presented below had normal veins prior to superficial femoral vein interruption, and did not develop postinterruption thrombosis.