How is peripheral arterial disease treated?

How is peripheral arterial disease treated?

Rose Marie Robertson, MD, FAHA, FACC, FESC (Chief Science Officer and Past President of the Board of American Heart Association) gives expert video advice on: How is peripheral arterial disease tested and diagnosed?; How is peripheral arterial disease treated? and more...

Treatments for peripheral arterial disease can vary depending on where the narrowing is located, how severe it is, and what the patient's other problems are. Certainly they will include addressing all the other risk factors for peripheral arterial disease, for atherosclerosis, to prevent problems elsewhere. All of these medications such as aspirin or other medications that effect blood thinning; beta blockers, ACE inhibitors, a whole sequence of medications, are known to have an important preventive effect for the things that can accompany peripheral arterial disease like heart attack and stroke. It will be important that people have their blood pressure and their cholesterol levels both monitored and controlled, brought back to normal, and that this be done continuously over a period of time, hoping that it will have an effect to improve blood flow to the legs but also hoping that it will prevent other more serious problems. If narrowings persist (as they often do) and if blood flow is still inadequate, there are a number of procedures that can be done; some in a surgical way, and some using angioplasty to open up arteries so that more blood flow can be provided to the legs, the limb can be salvaged and symptoms can often be made to go away.