Management of peripheral artery disease!
The main goals in treating these patients are to control the risk of adverse cardiovascular outcomes, enhance functional capacity, and keep limb viability. Multiple coexisting conditions are common in these patients with additional challenges in treatment.
Early diagnosis, lifestyle changes, and treatment can stop the disease progression. Disease symptoms might be reversible if you kept exercise combined with careful management of cholesterol and blood pressure.
A) Lifestyle changes include:
- Stop smoking. Ask your doctor about programs to stop smoking.
- Live healthily. Eat a healthy diet high in fibers and low in cholesterol, fat, and sodium. Avoid trans and saturated fats made with vegetable oils. If you are obese, you should decrease your weight to lower cholesterol and raise your HDL cholesterol.
- A regular exercise program, such as walking, can aid in the treatment. People who walk regularly have a definite improvement in the walking distance before experiencing leg pain.
- Control other health conditions, such as elevated blood pressure, diabetes mellitus, or elevated cholesterol.
- Keep away from stress and do exercise, yoga, or meditation.
- Care of the skin of your feet to reduce infections and decrease the risk of complications.
B) Treatment by medications include:
- Antihypertensive drugs -like angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors- decrease your high blood pressure.
- Statin medication lowers your high cholesterol.
- Hypoglycemic drugs lower blood sugar levels.
- Antiplatelet drugs -like aspirin- may reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke.
- Cilostazol helps patients with intermittent claudication exercises longer before they develop leg pain, so it improves your walking distance.
C) Supervised exercise programs:
If you are diseased, you should walk at home for at least 30 to 60 minutes every day. This program includes:
- Walk until the pain reaches a moderate level, then stop.
- Wait until the discomfort ends.
- Walk again.
In severe cases, your doctor should restore the blood flow to decrease pain at rest and improve wound healing.
An angiogram is the first step your doctor should perform to restore blood flow.
D) Endovascular (surgical) procedures include:
- Balloon angioplasty, in which your doctor passes a balloon through a catheter into your arteries. The balloon expands inside your arteries, pushes against the plaques, and widens the lumen inside your arteries.
- Stents are tiny metal support coils that your doctor inserts into your arteries through a small opening using a catheter. Stents expand against the inner wall of the blood vessel to support it and keep it patent.
- Bypass surgery, in which your doctor uses a part of your healthy vein or a synthetic replacement to create a bypass for blood flow around the stenosed area in your leg arteries.
- In Atherectomy, your doctor uses a catheter with a blade at its end to remove plaque.
Finally, you should live healthily and see your doctor when you feel leg pain or discomfort because early detection of the disease leads to a good prognosis.
