Peripheral Artery Disease (PAD) Awareness Month

September 2024 is PAD awareness month. For those who develop this condition, it can lead to many different types of diagnosis and complications. Advertisements and infomercials often emphasize peripheral arterial disease of the legs, but it can affect arteries throughout the body. Undiagnosed peripheral arterial disease can lead to limb loss, stroke, kidney damage, and inadequate intestinal blood flow. It is also associated with vascular disease of the heart and the brain. Although we have many sophisticated techniques available to us as vascular specialists to treat PAD, it is always better to identify it before it becomes symptomatic and treat it with lifestyle modification and medicine.

There are a number of well-known risk factors for PAD, such as smoking, high cholesterol, diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, being male, getting older, and family history. It is important to know that if you have risk factors your chance of having PAD goes up from approximately 12% to more like 30%. So, if you have one or more of those risk factors you should be seen by a primary care physician and your physical exam and history should be focused on identifying or ruling out this diagnosis. 

Many people avoid doctors because they do not want to deal with all the difficulties associated with a surgical procedure. It is important to be aware that peripheral arterial disease, when diagnosed early, is rarely a surgical issue. It is something that can be treated with lifestyle modification and potentially medical therapy. PAD progression can be halted with good medical therapy, so even if you have delayed seeing a doctor for years, if you present before dangerous symptoms, we can usually avoid surgery. 

On the other hand, ignoring the symptoms of PAD, such as non-healing leg or foot wounds, gangrene of the fingers or toes, pain in the legs with walking, stroke symptoms, uncontrolled high blood pressure, or consistent severe pain after eating can be very dangerous and limb or life threatening. Once severe symptoms present intervention is hard to avoid, but we have available to us many minimally invasive procedures that often do not require a hospital stay or at most one or two days in the hospital. So again, the earlier the presentation the better the outcome.

The specialists at Vascular Surgery Associates, LLC see thousands of PAD patients each year. We also see thousands of patients who have symptoms of possible PAD but are found not to have that diagnosis. We pride ourselves in being happy to treat patients with known PAD, but also to be part of the team figuring out the cause of your leg pain or abdominal pain even if you don’t turn out to have a vascular cause. So, if you think you may have PAD, have no reluctance to call the VSA specialists and schedule an appointment. We look forward to seeing you and helping diagnose and treat your health care needs.

Author

Peter Mackrell, MD Peter Mackrell, MD, FACS, is a board-certified vascular surgeon at Vascular Surgery Associates, LLC, serving patients in Ellicott City, Towson, and Baltimore, Maryland. Dr. Mackrell joined the practice in 2003.