Peripheral Artery Disease Treatment Options in Lexington, Kentucky

Baptist Health Lexington: Peripheral Artery Disease Treatment Options

Peripheral artery disease (PAD) occurs when plaque builds up in the arteries, causing symptoms of pain and changes in skin color. Learn about Baptist Health’s treatments for peripheral artery disease.

Peripheral Artery Disease Treatment Options in Lexington, Kentucky HealthTalks Transcript

Michael Shih, MD:
Peripheral arterial disease is an ailment that, unfortunately, affects millions of Americans and involves plaque building up in the arteries that supply blood and oxygen to the legs. The earliest symptoms that people experience are pain in the legs, skin changes in their shins and feet, loss of hair. Color changes to their skin is a common symptom as well.

Treatments are wide and varied. We like to focus first off with nutritional changes to eat a heart healthy diet, to have regular forms of exercise, walking more and working through that discomfort actually can help promote better blood flow and circulation to the feet and improve a person’s symptoms. But if that fails, people need good medicines like cholesterol-lowering medicines, blood pressure control medicines, making sure that their sugars are O.K. if they have diabetes, or people need to stop smoking.

Here at Baptist Health Lexington, we can offer additional therapies, including invasive options using catheters to take pictures of those blockages, identifying the location directly, and opening up and restoring flow to those arteries with catheter-based strategies, such as balloons and stents.

Many people can expect a full recovery, to at least return back to the degree of activity they were able to perform before the procedure, but my hope is that people would actually be able to perform greater amounts of activity.