The post What Kind of Doctor Treats Peripheral Arterial Disease in Phoenix (PAD)?* appeared first on Comprehensive Integrated Care.

We do understand the confusion. These two terms sound similar, as if they’re describing the same disease or medical condition. It’s easy to mistake one term for the other, and use them as if they mean exactly the same thing.

In this article we’ll explain what these two terms really mean, and what makes them different from one another. We do this because we’ve noticed that NOT knowing the difference can cause people problems when they start looking things up on the Internet, or searching for the right type of doctor to treat their circulatory problems.

The difference between peripheral artery disease and peripheral vascular disease – the short, sweet explanation

It’s pretty simple, actually:

• Peripheral artery disease (PAD) is the name of one specific disease, a condition that affects only arteries, and primarily the arteries of the legs.
• Peripheral vascular disease (PVD) is a generic “umbrella term” that describes a large number of circulatory diseases. These diseases affect not only arteries but also veins and lymphatic vessels. They can also appear in locations other than the legs, including the arms, neck, and face.

What is peripheral artery disease (PAD) – the slightly longer explanation

PAD (the specific disease) is caused by the buildup of a fatty, sticky substance called plaque on the inner surfaces of the arteries leading to your legs. This condition is known as atherosclerosis, but you may have also heard it referred to as “hardening of the arteries.”

No matter what you call it, it’s dangerous. The narrowing of the arteries restricts the amount of blood flowing to the legs, feet, and toes. Your lower extremities can’t get the oxygen and nutrients they need to stay healthy. So they begin to fail, in many ways. Common symptoms of PAD include leg pain, sores and wounds that won’t heal, and loss of mobility. Extreme symptoms of PAD include tissue death (gangrene), which can lead to amputation.

What is peripheral vascular disease (PVD) – the much longer explanation

As noted above, PVD refers to a number of different conditions. Some of them also affect arteries. Blockage to the coronary arteries feeding the heart, for example, can cause angina or a heart attack. Blockage in arteries feeding the kidneys can cause high blood pressure and heart failure. If arteries leading to the brain become blocked, the result can be a stroke or transient ischemic attack.

It’s important to remember, however, that peripheral vascular disease is a “group term,” and also involves diseases that affect the veins. The most common of these vein diseases is venous insufficiency, which can lead to varicose veins, in which the affected veins become swollen and discolored. More serious vein diseases can be caused by thrombosis, which is the formation of blood clots. These clots impair proper blood flow, just as atherosclerosis does, but they are in many ways more dangerous because they may not stay where they formed. With deep vein thrombosis (DVT), the clots can break off from where they started and travel to the lungs. This can lead to a pulmonary embolism, which can be fatal.

There are many other types of circulatory disease contained under the PVD “umbrella.” Aneurysms are bulges that form in the walls of blood vessels, and that can become dangerous. Lymphedema is a condition that blocks the lymph vessels and keeps them from draining fluid from tissues and supplying them with immune cells.

Why it’s important to know the difference between PAD and PVD

The difference between these two terms starts to affect you personally when you go to the Internet to look up information about them, or seek doctors who can treat them. What you’ll find is that many websites aren’t careful about making a distinction between PAD (the disease) and PVD (a whole range of diseases).

This can lead to confusion. If you have been diagnosed with PAD (the specific disease) for example, and go to Google looking for the best doctors who treat it in your area, it’s not going to help to be referred to doctors who may treat PVD (the larger group of diseases), but who may have little expertise in treating peripheral artery disease per se.

At Comprehensive Interventional Care Centers, we are famous for providing the best peripheral arterial disease treatment in Arizona. Some of our doctors also treat vein diseases and other forms of peripheral vascular disease. But if you’re looking for someone who really knows PAD and specializes in treating it, that’s us. Give us a call at 888-377-7122 and make an appointment to speak with our talented team of PAD experts.

The post Peripheral Artery Disease Vs. Peripheral Vascular Disease: What’s the Difference? appeared first on Comprehensive Integrated Care.

All PAD treatment options have the goal of controlling negative symptoms. At the same time, they try to slow the progression of the disease so that it doesn’t get any worse.

Some of these treatment options – called “conservative” or “natural” treatments – try to control symptoms through changes in your diet, exercise, and lifestyle. In other words, they involve as little direct medical intervention as possible. These natural treatment options do work for many patients, allowing them to reduce or eliminate the symptoms of their disease. They often help to stop the buildup of arterial plaque that narrows their arteries and causes the disease in the first place.

However, for other patients, more aggressive treatments are needed. These patients tend to either have more serious symptoms when they are first diagnosed with peripheral arterial disease, or they develop them later. The treatment options for these patients aim at physically removing the blockages to the arteries. These treatment options include minimally-invasive endovascular procedures such as balloon angioplasty, stent placement, or atherectomy.

So what determines which options are best for you, to most successfully treat your PAD? In this article, the best peripheral arterial disease specialists in Phoenix explain what we look at when we make a treatment recommendation.

The first question, of course, is “What are your symptoms?”

When a patient approaches us or is referred to us, we take the time to learn their medical history and do a focused examination. Our aim is to determine the best non-invasive study to be able to diagnose the problem as efficiently as possible. Many people with PAD have no symptoms at all. Others experience mild symptoms such as leg pain (claudication) and impaired mobility. Still others can have very strong symptoms that require more extensive treatment. These symptoms include leg pain that doesn’t stop even when at rest, sores on the legs and feet that don’t heal, or areas of coldness or numbness in the lower extremities.

If your PAD symptoms fall into the last category, they may indicate that you have or are in danger of developing critical ischemia (CI). This is a life-threatening condition that needs to be treated immediately, and aggressively. Advanced cases of PAD such as this can cause gangrene. If we don’t catch them in time, the result can be amputation. These advanced cases can also cause sepsis. Sepsis is a form of infection in which the body starts attacking its own tissues and organs. In severe cases like this, we would NOT recommend conservative treatment. What is needed is immediate intervention, before the disease becomes life-threatening.

Most of the time, however, we try to start with natural treatment

We will give you diet and exercise recommendations that will help you change your lifestyle. These lifestyle changes can help to minimize the impact that PAD is having on your circulation and your overall health. We can also help you to stop smoking, if needed. Quitting smoking alone will improve your vascular health. If you have high blood pressure, high blood cholesterol levels, or high blood sugar, we can treat these risk factors with medication. The medications help to control these risk factors so that they aren’t making your PAD any worse.

The next step in this natural treatment – and the most important – is to perform regular follow-up tests to see if natural treatment is working. If it is, and your symptoms are improving, that’s a good sign. If they’re getting better, we may decide that more aggressive treatment is not needed at this time. You can safely continue with the natural treatment. If your symptoms DON’T get better, however, or if tests indicate that the blockages are getting worse, we may recommend endovascular treatment.

One factor that can make conservative treatment NOT a good choice for you

Conservative treatment of PAD can work wonders, and quickly bring the disease under control. There is one problem with these lifestyle changes, however. You actually have to follow the recommendations before they work.

One of the reasons that supervised exercise programs are more successful at treating PAD than “exercising at home, on your own,” is that people don’t usually exercise at home on their own. Or they don’t exercise regularly enough for it to have any effect. Exercising with others can be more motivating. And even though quitting smoking is one of the most effective things people can do to treat their PAD, a lot of people find it too hard quit on their own and need additional help.

So, when considering whether natural or conservative treatment is a “good fit” for you, try to be honest with yourself as to whether you would actually follow the dietary, exercise, and lifestyle recommendations this treatment involves. If you suspect that you wouldn’t, natural treatment might not be the best option for you.

We can help you decide, and help you follow through. That, after all, is our job. We provide the best peripheral arterial disease treatment in Arizona, and we’re proud of our ability to do so. So give us a call at 888-377-7122 and let us help you find the best PAD treatment option, the one that is most likely to be successful for you.

The post Is Peripheral Arterial Disease Natural Treatment an Option for Me? appeared first on Comprehensive Integrated Care.

In this article, the specialists from Comprehensive Interventional Care Centers address these questions, and give you the straight answers you’re looking for.

To answer the first question, PAD is a very serious condition, one that requires treatment. That’s the bad news. The good news, however, is that with early diagnosis and assessment, peripheral arterial disease can be successfully treated. Its symptoms can be managed and even reversed, and you can enjoy a long, active life free from symptoms such as constant leg pain.

First step – get an assessment from peripheral arterial disease specialists

The first thing you should do is to schedule an examination and assessment of your condition with doctors who specialize in the diagnosis and treatment of PAD. Your family doctor may have noted your symptoms and made some tests, and suggested on the basis of them that you have peripheral artery disease. But you need to know more than that before you decide on the best treatment.

Peripheral arterial disease specialists such as the doctors at CiC can perform more extensive tests to determine first whether you really have PAD, and second, how serious your condition is if you do. Our specialists use sophisticated diagnostic equipment such as Doppler ultrasound to determine whether there is a buildup of plaque in your arteries that is blocking them. If necessary, we can use more extensive tests such as angiography to pinpoint the exact location of these blockages, and determine how much of a danger they pose to you.

This information allows us to make accurate assessments of the extent of your disease, and decide whether it should be treated conservatively, or more aggressively. Possible treatment options can include:

Conservative or natural treatment

For mild cases of PAD, the first line of defense is natural treatment. This option focuses on helping you to modify your lifestyle to reduce the risk factors that cause atherosclerosis (the buildup of plaque that causes PAD). This form of treatment may include recommendations for dietary changes, weight loss, smoking cessation, walking or exercise programs, and advice on proper foot care. We wrote about these natural treatment options in more depth in two recent articles:

• “How Changing Lifestyle Habits Is an Effective Peripheral Arterial Disease Natural Treatment”
• “Is Peripheral Arterial Disease Natural Treatment an Option for Me?”

Click the links if you’d like to read more about these options.

Medical Management

Sometimes our examination of your condition shows you have certain critical risk factors that cause PAD and contribute to making it worse. If this is true, we may supplement the conservative treatments discussed above by prescribing medications such as:

• Cholesterol-lowering drugs (statin medications) to reduce your risk of heart attack and stroke.
• High blood pressure medications. If you have high blood pressure, your doctor may prescribe medications to lower it.
• Medications to control blood sugar. This is even more important if you have diabetes in addition to PAD.
• Medications to prevent blood clots and improve blood flow.
• Symptom-relief medications such as cilostazol to increase blood flow to the limbs and alleviate leg pain so you can walk more easily.

Interventional Management

Sometimes, peripheral artery disease requires more than lifestyle changes and medications to control it. If your symptoms do not respond to conservative treatment, your doctors may recommend more aggressive treatment options.

At Comprehensive Interventional Care Centers, these advanced treatments are reserved for patients whose symptoms are severe, or who are at high risk of serious problems such as gangrene or the loss of organ function. To reduce these risks, our Interventional Radiology Endovascular Specialists use procedures that are nonsurgical and minimally invasive. They include techniques such as catheterization, balloon angioplasty, stent placement, and atherectomy to open blocked arteries and restore proper blood flow.

In some cases, patients who have or are in danger of developing life-threatening conditions such as critical ischemia may be referred for a procedure called bypass grafting. In this procedure, the specialist uses a blood vessel from another part of the body or a synthetic tube to bypass (go around) a seriously blocked artery. These procedures don’t cure PAD per se, but they are sometimes required.

The decision as to which treatment option is best made by you, working in conjunction with peripheral arterial disease specialists

At CiC, we will present to you the best possible treatment options for your PAD, based on our many years of experience. If conservative or natural treatment is appropriate for your case, we’ll recommend it, and supplement it if necessary with specific medications. If we find that your symptoms or the rate at which your disease is progressing are more serious, we’ll present more interventional options for your consideration. Our goal is always to find the treatment that is best suited to each patient.

So give us a call at 888-377-7122 and get the evaluation process started. The sooner you start treating PAD, the sooner you can become free of its symptoms.

The post Your Options in Peripheral Arterial Disease Treatment appeared first on Comprehensive Integrated Care.

Peripheral Arterial Disease

What are the symptoms and causes of PAD?

Phoenix cardiologists describe the common symptoms of PAD: 

• Pain or cramping in the legs after walking or climbing stairs
• Numbness or weakness in the legs
• Coldness in the legs, feet, or toes
• Sores or color changes on the legs
• Hair loss or shiny skin developing on your legs and feet
• Weaker leg pulse
• Erectile dysfunction in men.

However, you can have PAD and display none of these symptoms.

The primary cause of PAD is atherosclerosis, or the buildup of fatty plaque on the interior walls of the arteries. Significant risk factors for PAD include smoking (which increases your risk 2-4 times), diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure (over 140/90), aging, and a family history of heart disease or stroke. PAD is a serious disease. Left untreated it can cause critical limb ischemia (open sores that don’t heal, sometimes developing into gangrene and requiring amputation), stroke, and heart attacks.

How do I know if I have Peripheral Arterial Disease? How is it diagnosed?

PAD can be detected by your peripheral arterial disease specialist as the result of a physical examination in which weak or absent pulses are found in your extremities, and also using the ankle-brachial index, a specialized blood pressure test in which blood pressure in your arm is compared to blood pressure in your ankle. The doctor may also use other non-invasive procedures such as Doppler ultrasound (to analyze actual blood flow to pinpoint blockages or narrowed arteries), specialized blood tests, and angiography.

How is PAD treated?

Peripheral Arterial Disease treatment has two goals – to manage symptoms, and to stop the progression of atherosclerosis to reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke. In some cases, this can be done by making lifestyle changes such as smoking cessation, weight loss, and regular exercise. In other cases, medications can be used to lower cholesterol levels, lower high blood pressure, control blood sugar, prevent blood clots, and relieve extreme symptoms.

If the PAD has progressed to a point at which even more extensive treatment is needed, the experienced doctors at Comprehensive Interventional Care Centers can also perform endovascular treatments. These treatments include lower extremity angioplasty and stenting, atherectomy, mesenteric angioplasty and stenting, carotid angiography, carotid stenting, and endovascular abdominal aortic aneurysm repair to treat severely damaged arteries.

So if you have a family history of atherosclerosis or heart disease, if you have noticed any of the symptoms discussed earlier, or if you have increased risk factors for developing PAD, give the best heart doctors in Phoenix a call at 888-377-7122 or visit us online at www.ciccenters.com to find a specialist near you. We can set up an appointment to determine the exact state of your PAD health.

The post Phoenix Medical Specialists Discuss the Diagnosis and Treatment of Peripheral Arterial Disease (PAD) appeared first on Comprehensive Integrated Care.

How do arteries become blocked?

Atherosclerosis or “hardening of the arteries” occurs as the result of a lifetime’s buildup of cholesterol-laden arterial plaque inside the walls of the arteries themselves. As you age, the plaque burden becomes greater, and the arterial walls become inflamed and sticky, and attract other substances like lipoproteins, inflammatory cells, and calcium, creating even more of a buildup. These deposits of plaque cause the arteries, which start out smooth and elastic, to become more narrow and rigid. Naturally, this restricts the proper flow of blood to the heart, starving it of the oxygen and nutrients it needs to function properly.

What are the effects of blocked arteries?

Phoenix cardiologists explain that narrowed coronary arteries can lead to cardiac ischemia, in which the clogged arteries simply cannot deliver enough oxygenated blood to the heart to meet its needs. Eventually narrowed coronary arteries may become so narrow that they develop collateral circulation, in the form of new blood vessels that go around the blockage to pump blood to the heart muscle. But during times of stress, these new vessels may not be able to supply sufficient oxygenated blood to the heart muscle for it to keep pumping properly, and the result may be a heart attack. Ischemia is more pronounced when the heart is under load (meaning being used more heavily, for example when you are climbing stairs or exercising). But CAD can progress to the point that ischemia can occur even when the heart is at rest.

Symptoms of blocked arteries and Coronary Arterial Disease

One of the most common symptoms of CAD-related ischemia is angina, or chest pain, often described as feelings of heaviness, aching, pressure, numbness, or fullness in the chest area. Angina can be severely painful, or so moderate that it is mistaken for indigestion or heartburn. Other symptoms include shortness of breath, heart palpitations (irregular rhythms), faster heartbeat, weakness, dizziness, nausea, or sweating. On the other hand, some people with advanced CAD experience no symptoms at all, and their first indication that something is wrong is when they have a heart attack.

How are CAD and narrowed arteries diagnosed and treated?

Phoenix heart doctors can detect blocked arteries and CAD as the result of a physical examination, combined with specialized diagnostic tests such as electrocardiograms (ECG) and stress tests. Treatment for CAD often involves lifestyle changes such as smoking cessation, weight loss, lowering high cholesterol levels and lowered intake of high-cholesterol foods, and adopting a low-fat, low-salt diet. Medications can help to lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels, and to help your heart work more efficiently. In severe cases, invasive surgery may be necessary to open severely clogged arteries.

How can I avoid blocked arteries and CAD?

The best way to be proactive about your heart health is to get a complete checkup from your local Phoenix cardiologist. Give us a call at 888-377-7122 and we’ll set up an appointment to determine the state of your heart health, and based on those findings we can make recommendations to keep you healthy.

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