Drug Treatments & Lifestyle Choices – living with peripheral artery disease
“The causes of arterial disease
are smoking, diabetes,
high cholesterol, high blood pressure and family history.”
What treatment is available?
Dealing with the risk factors
For everyone with arterial disease it is vital to treat the cause of the problem to stop it getting worse and spreading to affect other arteries. This
means dealing with the risk factors. It is sometimes necessary to treat the symptoms with exercise and tablets and by improving the blood supply to the leg.
It is important to deal with smoking, cholesterol, blood pressure etc to help try and stop the disease getting any worse. This is also important because
it reduces the risk other problems such as heart attack. Most people with arterial disease worry about the risk of amputation (this is rare) what they
should be worrying about is the risk of a heart attack which is the same as if they had angina.
People with arterial disease should be on a cholesterol tablet (statin) and a blood thinning tablet (usually 75mg aspirin once a day).
Exercise
This helps the muscles keep going for longer and is also good for all the arteries. Any exercise is helpful but walking is best, it is important to keep
it going for long enough to train the muscles, 20 minutes three times a week is a suggested minimum, it should be hard enough to produce an ache but not so
hard that you have to stop. It works best if you build it into your daily routine for example, walking the dog, going to the paper shop, walking to work.
Exercise programmes, particularly supervised ones can improve the distance people can walk by about 50%.
Tablets
The most effective tablets available to improve walking distance is one called cilostazol. The availability of this on the NHS is variable as not all GP
practices can fund it. Some people find this very helpful others less so. It is worth giving it a least a month to work before deciding whether it is helpful
or not. This needs to be prescribed by your GP who knows what other tablets you may be taking.
If symptoms continue to be very troublesome and the methods mentioned above are not doing the trick then it is sensible to consider doing something to the
artery to improve the blood flow. This can be an angioplasty or a bypass operation (see discussions about these). In rare cases where the blockages deteriorate
to the point where there is pain at rest or threat to the leg itself it is essential to try and improve the blood supply to the leg.