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Extremity/Leg Peripheral Artery Disease
Overview
Peripheral artery disease refers to a blockage or narrowing of the leg arteries. The leg arteries supply blood to the leg muscles. A blockage in the leg arteries can cause a pain or discomfort in the leg.
Causes of Extremity/Leg Peripheral Artery Disease
Most blockages are caused by atherosclerosis or a build-up of cholesterol. There are many risk factors for atherosclerosis such as getting older, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes, smoking, obesity, sedentary lifestyle, stress, and family history.
Symptoms of Extremity/Leg Peripheral Artery Disease
Approximately half of patients do not have symptoms. The patients with symptoms often have pain, cramping, or aching discomfort in their calf, thigh or buttocks muscles with walking. This may cause people to limp and eventually stop walking. The discomfort then resolves in a few minutes. These symptoms occur because with walking, the leg muscles want more blood and oxygen, but the blockage limits the supply of blood resulting in muscle pain. With severe disease, patients may have leg pain at rest or develop sores or ulcers on their legs
Diagnostic Tests
Your doctor may suspect disease if he hears a whoosing sound when listening to your leg arteries with a stethoscope or feels faint pulses. Your doctor will order blood pressure tests on your arm and legs to calculate an ankle-brachial index to determine how much blood flow is getting to the feet. Other simple non-invasive tests include ultrasound, CT scan and magnetic resonance angiogram to produce images of the leg arteries to help localize the blockages. A more invasive, but more accurate, test is an angiogram where a doctor inserts a catheter into the leg artery and injects dye into the leg artery.
Treatment Options
Treatment depends on the cause of the disease, its severity, and associated problems or symptoms that you may have. Your doctor will prescribe medications to treat blood pressure, cholesterol, and diabetes. He will also recommend diet, stopping smoking, and exercise. For many patients, this may sufficient and your doctor will follow your blockage with periodic ultrasound exams. Patients with severe symptoms may need more invasive treatments, such as angioplasty with stent or leg bypass surgery. Angioplasty is a minimally invasive procedure where the doctor advances a balloon catheter to the blockage and inflates it to open the blockage. He then places a stent, a metal coil, at the blockage to hold it open. With surgery, the doctor often takes a vein or artificial tube and makes an bypass route around the blockage.
Additional Information
www.cardiosmart.org
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