Varicose Veins: Symptoms

00:01 The symptoms: of course, most varicose veins don’t cause any of these nasty problems.

00:08 They’re superficial and, particularly in women, they are said to be cosmetically ugly.

00:15 Women of course want to have beautiful legs and so many women with varicose veins will go to a surgeon or to a vein specialist. And they can do one of two things: they can actually remove the veins or they can squirt a very caustic material into the vein causing the vein to scar over and disappear.

00:40 Some people who have a lot of varicose veins will actually have aching in the lower extremities.

00:45 Often this is due to swelling and, again, edema we’ve talked about. That edema from venous disease often goes down at night when you put your legs on the same level as your heart and the gravity is no longer working.

00:58 In heart failure, often the edema doesn’t disappear as easily.

01:04 Varicose veins can affect the quality of life. In fact, they can decrease it, particularly if they’re symptomatic. This figure shows quality of life scores for a number of different kinds of venous quality of life indices.

01:22 And what you see in the dark green is patients with the post-thrombotic syndrome – the one that we’ve talked about before where there’s ulcers and brown discoloration in the leg and swelling – and then compared to patients who don’t have the post-thrombotic syndrome but who have varicose veins. And you can see that the quality of life – a variety of different questions about, “How are you able to exercise? Do you have discomfort? Are you worried about how unsightly they are? Do you avoid people?” and so forth. You’re much worse off if you have the post-thrombotic syndrome with all of the attendant anatomical problems that go with that.