A lot of people have it and might not even know that they have it. Peripheral arterial disease is a disease process that doesn't discriminate. It impacts all different classes, ages, races of people throughout the world, affecting upwards of 5 to 6 million people in the United States alone.
PAD or peripheral arterial disease represents a chronic medical condition by which patients have plaque buildup inside the blood vessels, which limits the blood flow to their legs. Classic symptoms are pain in the calves with walking that goes away after you sit down. It starts again when you walk.
We can treat that just with medical management and a walking program. When peripheral arterial disease gets more severe, patients can notice things like pain at rest.
And the more advanced stage, called critical limb threatening ischemia, is where you start having wounds and gangrene on the feet.
It's the most severe type of arterial disease in the legs, and if that goes untreated, then it can lead to amputation.
This is a marker of your overall cardiovascular health. I can't say enough about how important it is to care for peripheral arterial disease. Surgery alone does not provide lasting benefits to these patients. It is a chronic condition, and so commitment to medical and lifestyle therapies is lifelong.
Mayo Clinic is one of the best places to have treatment for arterial disease because we really treat the disease globally, and we do it very, very well.
We make it easy for you to meet all these different specialists to understand why it's important to have all these different issues addressed under one roof. This includes not just a vascular surgeon, but a dietician, a social worker, a nicotine cessation counselor, a diabetologist, a wound care expert, a cardiovascular medicine expert, usually a cardiologist. So the point to take home is that you're not just coming to Mayo Clinic to treat your PAD, you're coming to Mayo Clinic to treat all the underlying reasons you developed PAD.
One of the best things patients can do to treat their arterial disease is to to break those really tough habits like quitting smoking and starting to walk more and focusing on a healthier diet.
For critical limb threatening ischemia, the indication is more obvious. If we don't perform vascular surgery, you are at an extremely high risk of losing that limb.
As vascular surgeons, our goal is to keep people's limbs as long as possible, and we do whatever we can from surgery to wound care, to optimizing medical care and other treatment modalities. So for these individuals, we do a surgical intervention to restore inline blood flow down to the feet.
There exists a variety of both open and minimally invasive surgeries to treat the symptoms of peripheral arterial disease. We have access to state-of-the-art hybrid surgical suites. We have a very robust research arm to our PAD practice from early detection of PAD leading to better screening, developing medical treatments to cure peripheral arterial disease.
We have all the technology that's necessary to treat arterial disease on the shelf so we can really treat all patients who come in with the best possible treatments that exist. It's just that you need to be evaluated appropriately and have the right testing done so that the treatment can be optimized for you.
So when you come to Mayo Clinic, please know that you are everything that matters to us.