Medication continues after the procedure...it does not replace meds. The test results are relapse rate in the 2 years prior the the procedure, and relapse rate the year after the procedure. It does not say explicitly in the trial if meds were stopped or started, one can assume they stayed the same....but it is a poorly written trial report that does not explicitly identify it. That article I posted in Reply #38 does say medication was continued...so a 23% improvement is just improvement above medication, medication is not stopped or replaced.

I kind of thought there was some unrealistic beliefs about the procedure going on.

At the very least a more complete study has to be done before we know.

Its like people believe they have a choice between the surgery or the med. The choice is more..meds alone or meds with the surgery? I don't think surgery alone is one of the options.

Who would want drugs if there is a surgery that could actually fix us??? About 30% of dr Zamboni's patients did relapse, but these were the ones whos veins did not remain unblocked.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

First, I am unclear if there is anything in this that will "fix us." I am saying, can this reverse the accumulated damage? And I thought, maybe I am wrong, that the drug therapy continued.

But the fact that 30% relapsed because the veins did not remain unblocked, well, isn't unblocking the veins the treatment? So again, maybe I am reading this wrong, but discounting the actual testimony of patients as to what did and did not improve, the treatment itself, the technique, failed in 30% of the patients. Is there anything to indicate that some will and some will not be bvetter candidates? Is there a common thread among the ones for whom the technique failed?

I know what it is called...when the dot. com bubble burst and the stock market took a nosed dive, alan Greenspan the chair if the federal reserve at the time described it as "IRRATIONAL EXUBERANCE" That's what this is, irrational exuberance based upon a 65 person trial, of 18 months, with people in three MS categories: RR, SP & PP. It is irrational exuberance.

I would really just like to know, of the 30% who physically rejected the treatment, was there a common CRAB drug that had been used, were they close in age, did they have any other physical conditions in common, this type of thing, JMO, is importatn for us to know.

I wonder what questions would be raised if Tysabri had a 30% infection rate? People are hesitant on the 1 in a thousand, and then the 1 in 770. Suppose it was 335 in 1000. Would there even be a question?

What are the immediate and lasting effects of this treatment being rejected?

My thought is not to make it harder to get approved, but to get the most info so that we can really make the right decisions.

I was wrong. On the last page of the study report it does say that " Another influentia factor of the favorable RR group could be the continuing immunomodulating treatment, which is well known to be capable of significantly reducing relapse rates as well as MRI-detectable Gad+ lesions. It does, however, appear that ewndiovacular treatment on concomitant CCSVI may have an additional benefit on lesion activity"

.......http://www.ctv.ca/generic/WebSpecials/pdf/YMVA_4198_Zamboni_final.pdf.....

So its is not a choice between surgery or med, it is a choice between med alone ore med with the surgery. It says that explicitly in the trial. Meds were continued with the surgery to go fro 27% to 50% relapse fee over 18 months.

Thanks, nny, I thought I saw that somewhere. Lots of reading on this, not so much memory!