What is "claudication"?

What is "claudication"?

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...

Claudication refers to the symptoms that people have that are due to peripheral arterial disease or atherosclerosis in the blood vessels supplying the legs and buttocks. Claudication means the discomfort that you have in those muscles when you exercise. The discomfort can be felt in various ways by different people; it can be a sense of fatigue or heaviness, often cramping, or sometimes actually pain in the leg, calf, thigh, or in the buttocks when you're exercising. So, when you're walking down the hall or down the street, pain and discomfort will gradually develop, and within a pretty short period of time and a pretty short distance, you find that you really just can't walk anymore, you have to stop and rest. The reason you can't is that the blood flow is not adequate for what the muscle needs at that moment.