What You Should Know About Peripheral Artery Disease (PAD)

Peripheral Artery Disease Treatments

What are the treatments for PAD?

Lead a healthy lifestyle. If you smoke, stop. Eat a healthful diet. Maintain a healthy body weight and control cholesterol, blood pressure, or diabetes.

Exercise. Exercise not only prevents the progression of PAD, it actually reduces your symptoms by improving your muscles' ability to extract oxygen from the blood and use it more efficiently. PAD patients should walk until they have pain, rest until the pain subsides, then walk until the pain returns.

Take medications. Patients with PAD should take medicine. Typically, this includes a statin to reduce LDL (bad) cholesterol to below 100 mg/dL, medication to control blood pressure, and aspirin or clopidogrel (Plavix) to prevent blood clots. To relieve symptoms of PAD, the drug cilostazol (Pletal) can improve blood flow by increasing the size of small blood vessels and by preventing blood clots.

Try surgery and other interventions. Stents or bypass surgery can be done if symptoms do not improve, if wounds do not heal, or if there is risk of amputation.

When PAD is caught early, smart changes can prevent or even reverse the disease.