Influence of medical compression stockings on venolymphatic drainage in phlebologically healthy test persons and patients with chronic venous insufficiency.

The goal of this study was to investigate the influence of medical compression stockings on venolymphatic drainage in phlebologically healthy test persons and patients with chronic venous insufficiency. Using this new method, the outflow of an intradermally injected sodium fluorescein solution can be densitrometrically determined over a period of 60 min. In an evaluation of the method carried out over 5 weeks with 4 test persons, the variation coefficient was 19.3%, indicating a sufficient reproducibility. Concerning the effect of below-knee stockings (ankle pressure 30 mm Hg) on venolymphatic drainage, improvements of around 200 (p < 0.0001) and 250% were recorded for 10 healthy test persons (mean age 29.0 +/- 3.1 years) and 20 patients suffering from chronic venous insufficiency (classes 4 and 5; p < 0.001), respectively. The results lead us to conclude that (i) the method presented here enables a quantification of the venolymphatic drainage and (ii) that therapy with compression stockings, for both healthy test persons and patients suffering from chronic venous insufficiency, leads to a significant improvement of venolymphatic drainage.