Varicose Veins – Physiology

Transcript

“Going back to why the symptoms are where they are. These varicose veins normally are let’s say of exercise, and what’s important for these veins, they want to remain in those sides because the way that blood moves from your toes to your heart. It’s fairly easy to understand how blood goes from your heart, to your toes. And that is because you have two things. You have a big muscle, like the heart pumping, the blood outwards, and second, you have gravity. So it makes easy to understand how blood reaches from point A to point B in your foot. But how does blood return? Is a little more difficult to comprehend. And we don’t have a big heart pumping in our feet, the blood up. And in a way we do. And those that are potent cuff muscles, the gastrocnemius muscle and the soleus muscles are actually those hearts in your legs, that when you walk, they contract and push the blood up to your heart.

But if that would be the only mechanism still doesn’t completely explain how the blood reaches from your toes to your heart, with a single pump, as much as even if you have a pretty muscular calf, how does that happen? Well, that’s happened for a little miracle called valves, and those valves are present at different lengths along your veins. And so let’s say that a calf compresses the blood, the blood goes up because of the force, but because of gravity that dies to go down to your foot again. Well, you have those valves that are only a uni-directional door. So allow the blood to go up. But as gravity wants to bring it down, it closes and blood doesn’t go back and just stays at that level until the next pump comes and keeps going up and up into your heart. The amount of time that our blood is supposed to be in your legs is less than half a second. That blood is supposed to be down in and out with no spaces or no, staying there for too long. And that’s in a normal person, what happens. So intuitively you understand now what happens if that vein enlarges. If that vein enlarges, those valves don’t enlarge with it. They stay the same size. So when they want to close, blood returns down without any impediment to come down. So the half a second or less that your blood was supposed to stay, there becomes one, two and three seconds.”