My name is Cat. I am an RN and I want to clear something up.
The word/term "lesions" mean many different things to different specialty physicians.
Neurologists call the sclerotic areas in the brain noted as white areas on an MRI as lesions. Or plaques.
Interventional radiologists call areas of stenosis or narrowing, flaps, valvular malformations etc as lesions. or cause of reflux. Or anomaly.
So when speaking about MS/CCSVI and lesions ONE MUST CLARIFY.
The area in the brain that has the the plaque is always wrapped around a venule. ( the tinyest veins) These lesions have never been mapped to the areas of function matching disability. Although the inflammation does at times correlate with "a flare up of symptoms" . This has baffled physicians for decades that location does not map like in. Brain surgery.
Also the distribution , severity and location of the vein abnormalities in CCSVI is still in it's infancy of understanding. It does look like these things do influence the degree of reflux and disability. Such as those with absent or severely malformed/
Blocked veins having the most profound impact on disability.
Hope this helps.
By the way an oncologist will call a tumor a lesion, a dermatologist will call a mole a lesion and a primary care doc may call a rash lesions. So it's a specialty thing.
Cat (Catherine Somerville on FB)
My 35 yo daughter is newly dx 8/19/10 (had 12 symptoms)
Dx with Type A CCSVI- 1 IJV & double "candy wrapper" appearance of her Azygos
Venoplasty done Sept 21, 2010
Doing extremely well-