Kissing stents offer an invaluable alternative to surgery. There were no long-term occlusions following kissing stents in a previously non-symptomatic/non-diseased limb.

The 2 methods of assessing PS are not comparable. Although pPS is accepted as a platelet activation marker, sPS may be a better indicator of aggregation represented by SPA.

In the assessment of CVI, mean walking pressure and percent fall in walking pressure are more reliably associated with anatomic distribution of reflux and clinical severity of CVI than the gold standard investigations of conventional AVP and RT90.

This is a study of 97 patients who underwent 106 femoropopliteal bypass grafts (9 bilateral bypasses) for short-distance claudication and critical ischemia. Patients were divided into 2 groups. The first group (n=64) was followed up by use of duplex scans. The second group (n=42) was followed up in clinic without duplex surveillance. Twenty-three patients from the surveillance group developed stenoses of the grafts. Of these, 14 underwent successful angioplasty. A total of 43 grafts became blocked. Graft occlusion was significantly more common in the nonsurveillance group (n=29) as compared to the surveillance group (n=14) after both 1 and 3 years of observation (p=0.001). Patients with critical ischemia showed a higher rate of graft occlusion than the claudicants (p=0.0075). Sixteen patients in the nonsurveillance group underwent above/below-knee amputation compared to 1 in the surveillance group. There was no significant difference in the mortality rate in the 2 groups. Graft surveillance helped to improve patency of grafts by identifying the correctable lesions.

This study shows that walking intensity is lower in the more severe clinical groups and may be influenced by the clinical severity of CVI. The study provides evidence that prolonged sitting and reduced standing is associated with increased severity of CVI, which may by an effect of the patient's symptoms rather than a cause of disease progression.