Early endovenous ablation speeds venous ulcer healing

Early endovenous ablation also was associated with a delay in the recurrence of ulcers. The rate of recurrence was 11.4% among patients in the early-intervention group whose ulcers had healed and 16.5% among those in the delayed-intervention group whose ulcers had healed.

Patients who received the early endovenous ablation had a median ulcer-free time of 306 days, compared with 278 days in the delayed-intervention group, a significant difference.

The authors noted that all patients in the study also received high-quality compression therapy, which may account for the good healing rates seen in both groups that might not otherwise be observed in a real-world clinical setting.

“Accordingly, the improvement in ulcer healing with early endovenous intervention is likely to be greater in clinical practice than was observed in this trial,” the authors wrote. “Because endovenous intervention is usually performed as a single procedure, the clinical benefits are likely to be less dependent on ongoing patient adherence than they would be with compression therapy.”