Outcome Measures After Sclerotherapy of Venous Malformations: A Systematic Review

Sclerotherapy has become an important treatment option in the management of vascular malformations. However, little is known about success rate for treatment of venous malformations. This systematic review assesses the available published literature on outcome measures of sclerotherapy for venous malformations.

PubMed and EMBASE.

A systematic search was conducted, and studies from March 2008 to October 2016 were included. Based on the identified search results, study selection, data extraction, and assessment of study quality were, according to PRISMA, undertaken independently by two reviewers.

One randomized controlled trial and 44 cohort studies were included. The most frequently used measuring methods were subjective measurements, objective measurements, imaging like MRI and ultrasound, and finally patient reported outcome measure survey. Approximately 60% of the studies used more than one measuring method. Outcome measures were pain, swelling, disfigurement, cosmetic complains, patient satisfaction, physical difficulties, volume, diameter, mass, color, shape, size, venous flow, occlusion of venous space, blood pool ratio, and radioisotope uptake.

The published literature over the past 10 years shows no clear method to evaluate the effect of sclerotherapy for venous malformation. We suggest that a standard set of outcome measures should be defined.