Peripheral Artery Disease

What is peripheral artery disease?

Peripheral artery disease (PAD) occurs when your larger peripheral arteries narrow or become blocked. This causes insufficient blood flow to your limbs. Although peripheral artery disease may develop in your arms, it’s far more common in the legs.

What are the symptoms of peripheral artery disease?

There are many possible signs of PAD, including:

• Leg or foot pain
• Numbness in legs, feet, arms, or fingers
• Slow-healing wounds, particularly on your extremities
• Leg cramps/pain during exercise
• Slower hair and nail growth on affected leg or arm
• Discolored leg, foot, arm, or fingers

Many peripheral artery disease sufferers experience several of these symptoms simultaneously.

What causes peripheral artery disease?

The cause of peripheral artery disease is atherosclerosis, which is characterized by fatty buildup inside your artery walls. Eventually, the fatty deposits inside your arteries harden, making normal blood flow impossible.

There are many different reasons that you may develop atherosclerosis. The main risk factors for atherosclerosis and peripheral artery disease are:

• Smoking
• Diabetes
• High cholesterol
• Hypertension (high blood pressure)
• Excess weight
• Sedentary lifestyle
• A family history of peripheral artery disease or other vascular diseases
• Age 60 or older

Although you can’t control your age or family history, you’re completely in control of factors like smoking, weight, and your activity level. Our Vascular risk assessment and treatment can help, you can minimize your risk for PAD or prevent a recurrence.

How is peripheral artery disease treated?

Peripheral artery disease treatment starts with managing your contributing health issues through lifestyle changes. Dr. Kalsi may recommend a healthier diet, stopping smoking, regular exercise, and other changes to help you improve your overall health and minimize PAD symptoms.

In some cases, you’ll need blood pressure medicine, cholesterol medicine, medicine to prevent blood clots, or other oral medication to control your health issues. If you suffer from diabetes, you may need to take daily insulin or use an insulin pump, especially if you have Type 1 diabetes.

If lifestyle changes and medication don’t relieve your PAD symptoms, you may need a supervised exercise program, We can offer you 12 week supervised exercise program done in the office.  Occasionally you man need intervention such as a balloon angioplasty, to relieve the blockage in your artery and leave the artery open for blood flow. Very rarely surgery may be needed.

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