What are the symptoms of peripheral arterial disease?
The symptoms of PAD depend on which blood vessel is being affected most at the moment. So, a common symptom has to do with narrowing of the blood vessels to the legs. People often feel what we call clotication; this is simply pain in the legs when the muscles in the legs are working. So as people walk, they'll find that the muscles in their legs cramp and become quite painful to the point that they actually have to stop walking. They're unable to continue to walk through it. Patients who note clotication, who note this pain in the legs, calves, thighs or the buttocks when they walk, may actually notice other changes if they look carefully at their legs. They may notice that the hair doesn't grow so well, that there's a change in nail growth. Occasionally, they may notice that one leg is actually cooler than another. Sometimes people don't report those symptoms because they think that they're just simply a sign of aging or something that comes on and is due to some other cause. In fact, these are serious signs not only because of the risk to the actual limb itself, the fact that you can lose a limb, but because these symptoms suggest that there are problems in blood vessels in other parts of the body. People with clotication are also at increased risk of heart attack and stroke. So treatment is urgent, treatment really needs to get started, and ignoring these symptoms is a very risky thing to do.
