Robert Zivadinov
While our research points against CCSVI having a primary causative role in the development of MS, we have established that there is a higher prevalence of CCSVI in patients with progressive MS. This finding suggests that CCSVI may contribute to, or be a consequence of, disease progression, with important implications for treating its symptoms. Therefore, we investigated the associations between the presence of CCSVI and conventional MR imaging measures (lesion burden and brain atrophy) in a large cohort of patients with MS and controls.
We believe that our findings can substantially influence the practice, because there is an urgent need to demonstrate whether the presence of CCSVI in MS may be related to disease etiology and severity, including MR imaging outcomes, and we have been contacted by a number of authors who are interested in understanding whether CCSVI plays a role in the progression of MS.
We expanded this research recently by performing another study that investigated whether CCSVI is associated with hemodynamic and structural brain parenchyma changes in healthy individuals. This new study suggests that CCSVI may be associated with systemic changes related to the intracranial physiology in healthy individuals, which alters the relationship between the CSF flow, enlargement of lateral ventricles, and T2 lesion formation.
These findings were presented at the 28th European Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis, Lyon, France, October 10-13, 2012.