Peripheral Artery Disease: A Hidden Health Threat

Some diseases and disorders announce their presence through painful or obvious symptoms. But others lurk quietly in your body, silently damaging your health and eroding your ability to enjoy life.

One of those conditions is peripheral artery disease (PAD), a vascular disorder that is camouflaged by age. Symptoms are often disregarded as simply being part of getting older or attributed to being out of shape. The disease can make it challenging to comfortably engage in basic activities, including walking around the neighborhood, climbing stairs or even standing in your kitchen.

More importantly, PAD is a warning sign for increased risk for heart disease, stroke and other serious life-threatening conditions.

Don’t Ignore Symptoms

Peripheral artery disease is a chronic condition that is similar to the better-known coronary artery disease. Both conditions are caused by a buildup of plaque (mostly fat and cholesterol) on the walls of your arteries. In the case of PAD, this buildup is found in the arteries used by your heart to send blood to your legs.

In advanced stages, the disease can cause severe symptoms. But in the early stages, symptoms may be so mild as to be easily ignored or attributed to aging.

The classic telltale symptom of PAD is pain in your legs while walking. The pain, which could be in your calf, thigh, hip or buttock, tends to get better after you rest. Other symptoms include:

• Pain in your legs that can be relieved by hanging them over the side of bed or other surface
• Hair loss on your legs
• Skin that’s cooler than the rest of your body (cold toes, for example)
• Shiny, smooth or dry skin on your legs or feet
• Thickening of your toenails
• Wounds that won’t heal (even after four to six weeks)
• Weakened pulse in your legs or feet
• Gangrene (dry, black skin) in your legs or feet

Are You at Risk?

If you’ve been paying attention to your risk factors for coronary artery disease, you’re ahead of the game. The two diseases are so closely related that many people with PAD also have heart disease.

At the top of the list is cigarette smoking. Regardless of whether you are a current or former smoker, this is a key risk factor. Even if you stopped smoking in your 20s, the damage done to your blood vessels made them more vulnerable to plaque buildup. It’s like a snowball effect over the years, with calcium, cholesterol and other substances slowing attaching themselves to the walls of your arteries.

The second biggest risk factor is diabetes. In combination, the two diseases can be particularly troublesome. People with diabetes are already at higher risk for circulation problems that can lead to amputation of lower extremities, so it’s important for them to get their circulation checked regularly.

Other risk factors include:

• Age 65 or older
• High blood pressure
• High cholesterol
• Obesity
• Kidney disease
• Family history of PAD or heart disease

Treating Peripheral Artery Disease

The good news is that there’s no reason to accept this potentially debilitation condition as a fact of your life. There are numerous treatment strategies that can help get you back on your feet – pain free.

When caught early, lifestyle changes (including better diet and stopping smoking) may be recommended by your doctor. Relief may also be achieved through exercise tolerance – where you gradually increase the distance you walk each day to improve blood flow to your legs.

Surgical options include balloon angioplasty, which uses a miniature balloon to expand and push open the narrowed artery. Tiny metal support stents can be used to expand the blood vessel and keep it open. And there is a procedure called atherectomy that uses a rotating blade to cut out the plaque buildup.

Often, PAD treatments are minimally invasive outpatient procedures that take less than an hour. Very quickly, you can have both your blood flow and quality of life restored.

This content is not AI generated.