CCSVI success of angioplasty for venous narrowing What do you mean by azygos holds better ?

"Azygos holds better" means the vein that runs down the chest stayed open far more often than the neck veins, not that the treatment works better.

The phrase is about patency, meaning whether the vein stays open after the balloon. In one CCSVI series, 18-month patency was 53% in the internal jugular veins versus 96% in the azygos vein [1]. The azygos is the deep vein running down the back of the chest; the jugulars are the big neck veins. So "holds better" is a plumbing observation about one vessel, not a claim about MS.

Two cautions. That patency figure comes from a narrative review, not a controlled trial, and the same review notes CCSVI prevalence in MS swings from 56% to 100% depending on the Doppler protocol, with other imaging methods failing to replicate the difference [1]. If the diagnosis is unreliable, "patency" is measuring a moving target.

And patency is a surrogate. A vein staying open is not the same as a patient walking better. The controlled trials in this thread were negative on clinical outcomes, and nothing in this evidence shows the azygos holding open translates into MS benefit.

My call: "azygos holds better" is a real patency difference in one uncontrolled series, and it tells you nothing about whether the procedure helps the disease. Confidence: moderate on the patency gap, low that it means clinical benefit.