Treatment

The goals of treating claudication and peripheral artery disease are to reduce pain and manage the risk factors that contribute to vascular disease.

Exercise

Exercise reduces pain, increases exercise duration, improves vascular health in the affected limbs, and contributes to weight management and an overall improvement in your quality of life.

Recommended walking programs include:

• Walking until you feel moderate pain
• Resting to relieve pain
• Walking again
• Repeating the walk-rest-walk cycle for 30 to 45 minutes
• Walking three or more days a week

Supervised exercise is recommended for beginning the treatment, but long-term exercise at home is important for ongoing disease management.

Medications to manage risk factors

Your doctor may prescribe one or more medications to control pain and manage risk factors for vascular disease. These include drugs to manage the following:

• Pain. The drug cilostazol, which improves blood flow, may reduce pain during exercise and enable you to walk further.
• High cholesterol. Statins are a class of drugs that help lower cholesterol, a key factor in the formation of plaques in arteries. Taking statins may improve the walking distance.
• High blood pressure. Several different classes of drugs may be prescribed to lower blood pressure and reduce the risk of heart attack or stroke.
• Other cardiovascular risks. Anti-platelet drugs, which help prevent the formation of blood clots, may reduce the risk of heart attack, stroke or clots blocking blood flow to limbs. These drugs include aspirin, clopidogrel (Plavix) and other classes of drugs.

Talk to your doctor about over-the-counter medications, supplements or other medications that you shouldn't take with your prescribed treatment.

Surgery

When peripheral artery disease is severe and other interventions do not work, surgery may be required. Options include:

• Angioplasty. This is a procedure to improve blood flow by widening a damaged artery. A doctor guides a narrow tube through your blood vessels to deliver an inflatable balloon that expands the artery. Once the artery is widened, your doctor may place a small metal or plastic mesh tube (stent) in the artery to keep it open.
• Vascular surgery. During this type of surgery, the doctor takes a healthy blood vessel from another part of your body to replace the vessel that's causing claudication. This allows blood to flow around the blocked or narrowed artery.