Quickshot: Knee Phleboarthrosis Patients Quality of Life

The combination of lower extremities varicosity with knee osteoarthrosis is called Phlebarthrosis. This combination is widely spread, extremely in older people. One of the biggest problem is the decrease of quality of life (QoL). That is why it is very important to evaluate the QoL dynamics, when we evaluate the treatment results.

Methods:

The research objective was to evaluate the QoL in patients with Phlebarthrosis before treatment and its dynamics during the treatment. In order to do it we used:

• Chronic Venous Insufficiency Questionnaire-2 (CIVIQ 2), which is validated for patients with chronic venous diseases.


• The Knee injury and Osteoarthritis Outcome Score (KOOS), specially its QoL part.


• Lequesne Index, it is so called knee arthrosis severity index.

We investigated 116 patients with knee phleboarthrosis. They passed the clinical and instrumental examination in order to be included into the investigation. The instrumental examination included knee X-Ray, knee ultrasonography, venous ultrasonography. All examinations were made before the investigation, 6 and 12 months later. Exclusion criteria were chronic arterial insufficiency level 2B and more after Pokrovsky-Fontaine iliac or femoral artery occlusion. We compared the QoL results with the results of 20 healthy volunteers.
The treatment consists of:

• Venous insufficiency treatment: elastic compression and phleboactive drug use


• Arthrosis treatment: non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs and disease modifying medications (so called chondroprotectors). All the patients strictly continued the pre-investigation scheme of non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs and disease modifying medications applying.

The results of QoL investigation by CIVIQ-2 were 47,6±2,9 points in Phlebarthrosis patients and 25,9±1,7 points in healthy patients before treatment. After 6 months the results in Phlebarthrosis patients group was 37,58±1,74 points and after 12 months it was 33,46±1,72.
The same situation was with the KOOS Scale. Before treatment the result was 32,15±9,17 points, 6 months later 46,29±7,11 points and 12 months later 55,44±8,03 points.
Evaluating the Lequesne Index we found that before treatment it was 10,49±1,12 points, that means “severe osteoarthritis”, 6 months later it decreased to 9,14±0,97 points and 12 months later to 7,85±0,83 points “moderate osteoarthritis”.

Conclusions:

1. The combination of lower extremities varicosity with knee osteoarthrosis leads to severe decrease of patients Quality of Life.


2. Venous insufficiency treatment increase the Quality of Life not only connected to varicose disease, but also to knee osteoarthritis.


3. Venous insufficiency treatment in such patients can also decrease the severity of knee osteoarthritis from severe to moderate.