Did you know that up to 55% of women and 45% of men have spider veins? Or that, collectively, more than half of people over the age of 50 have spider veins?
So, do these millions of people have a vascular issue that’s cause for concern? The short answer (and good news) is that spider veins are rarely problematic, medically speaking.
If you’re worried about a web of spider veins that's developed on your legs, you’ve come to the right place. Dr. Ariel Soffer and the team here at Soffer Health Institute specialize in vascular problems like spider veins.
Here’s what we want you to know about spider veins.
The first thing we want to touch on is that the term spider veins is a bit misleading. Spider veins don’t develop in veins, but smaller blood vessels called capillaries, venules, and arterioles. These blood vessels take on the roles as connectors between your larger veins and arteries.
Furthermore, spider veins really only develop in surface blood vessels that are only responsible for about 10% of the blood flow in your legs. The other 90% is deftly handled by blood vessels deeper in your tissues.
As we mentioned, the appearance of spider veins isn’t usually cause for concern. In most cases, spider veins pose more of a cosmetic issue than anything else.
That said, they can signal a larger problem like chronic venous insufficiency (CVI), which affects about 1 in 20 adults in the United States. With CVI, one-way valves that help move blood up your legs weaken and malfunction, which allows blood to pool and engorge the vein, thus creating a varicose vein. Spider veins can be another side effect of CVI, so it’s worth your while to have us perform a vein evaluation.
There are many risk factors for this vascular issue, starting with gender, as women outpace men by 2 to 1 when it comes to spider veins. We can explain this gender difference to some extent by reviewing the risk factors for these vascular lesions, which include:
As you can see, the first three risk factors on this list are common to women, which explains why spider veins are more prevalent in the fairer sex.
Another characteristic of spider veins that we want to bring to your attention is that, once they form, they won’t go away on their own. In fact, spider veins often get worse as you age.
The good news is that we offer quick-and-easy laser treatments for spider veins that clear your legs in just a few visits, sometimes even one visit. Using innovative laser technology, we deliver bursts of light energy into the blood vessel that breaks them apart, allowing your body to reabsorb the damaged blood vessel.
At the same time we treat your spider veins, we assess your vein health to make sure that the issue isn’t signaling something larger, such as the CVI we discussed earlier. As well, after your spider vein treatment, we can recommend ways you can prevent spider veins down the road.
For comprehensive and state-of-the-art care for your spider veins, or if you have more questions about these vascular lesions, please contact one of our offices in Weston or Hollywood, Florida, to set up an appointment.
