[Morphological and functional study of deep veins in the reverse flow island flap]

Reid and Biemer in 1983 introduced the reverse flow forearm flap and Yoshimura in 1984 reported the reverse flow peroneal flap. No problems were experienced in any of our cases by drainage from valves of the concomitant veins. From our experiments on one cadaver and eight freshly amputated limbs the following comments may be made about the mechanism of drainage in reverse flow in the concomitant vein: Each concomitant vein has many anastomoses and there are resulting by-passes which go around the valves. For that reason, the reflux does not always occur in all valves. It is believed that special valves only in certain parts of the vein are triggered to open when there is a 90-100 cm H2O pressure and at that time reflux occurs.