Objective: To describe typical clinical presentation of patients with microfistular, capillary-venule (CV) malformation as a variant form of arteriovenous malformations (AVM).
Methods: A retrospective clinical analysis of 15 patients with CV-AVM confirmed by a computational flow model enrolled in a prospective database of patients with congenital vascular malformation between January 2008 and May 2018.
Results: The mean age of the patients at first time of presentation was 30 years with balanced sex ratio. Presentation was dominated by soft tissue hypertrophy (n = 12 [80.0%]) and atypical varicose veins (n = 11 [73.3%]). The anatomic location of enlarged varicose veins gave no uniform pattern and did not correspond with the typical picture of primary varicose vein disease. Most often, symptomatic CV-AVM was found at the lower extremities in this series of unselected patients. The most frequent compartment affected was the subcutis (n = 14 [93.3%]), involvement of muscle was recorded in one-third and cutis in one-fourth of patients.
Conclusions: A high grade of clinical suspicion is needed to recognize CV-AVM and to prevent inadequate therapy owing to missed diagnosis.
Keywords: Chronic venous disease; Microcirculation; Varicose veins; Vascular malformation; Venous insufficiency.
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