Raising Awareness for Peripheral Artery Disease (PAD)

September is Peripheral Artery Disease (PAD) Awareness Month and for me, it is very personal. My aunt Dorothy was the pillar of my family and she had both diabetes and PAD. She would complain about how sore her legs were and just accepted it as part of getting older.?Unfortunately, she underwent an amputation and passed away less than a year later. I saw my Aunt Dorothy go from this strong woman to just a shell of herself. It was a defining moment in my life. Unfortunately, this is a story that I hear repeated too often. Amputations shouldn’t be the standard treatment for PAD. Her story and so many similar stories continues my resolve to help raise and increase awareness about what Peripheral Artery Disease is, educate people about what symptoms look like and how it can be treated.

The Cardiovascular Coalition, which is comprised of physicians, care providers, advocates, and manufacturers, has made it their mission to advance patient access to care because they know that death from PAD is preventable with access to care and the right interventional treatment. According to the coalition, there are approximately 20 million people in America who suffer from PAD, yet only a quarter to half of those people are aware that they have the disease.[i] That number is more than ten times higher globally—more than 200 million people around the world have PAD, yet almost half of those are asymptomatic.[ii] ?Not enough people know what PAD is, especially in communities of color. African Americans are at much greater risk for the disease with rates twice that of their white counterparts.[iii]

Education and awareness are the foundation of improving the patient journey for people with PAD. The more that patients, primary care physicians, and specialists can recognize the signs and symptoms—or even proactively look for symptoms in patients with comorbidities like cardiovascular disease or diabetes—the sooner patients can be diagnosed and treated.

There are also therapeutic solutions we are working on for patients who do require balloon angioplasty to clear blocked arteries in their lower limbs; Abbott’s LIFE-BTK trial is investigating the safety and efficacy of the Esprit-BTK Everolimus Eluting Bioresorbable Scaffold System, specifically designed to treat people with Critical Limb Ischemia, a severe form of PAD. The clinical trial has intentionally recruited principal investigators who work closely with underserved communities of color to reach the people who are disproportionately affected by PAD.

I may not have been able to prevent my aunt from suffering from PAD and undergoing an amputation, but I have learned from her experience and have made it my mission to help others, educating them about PAD and hopefully preventing someone else’s aunt, or mother or sister from the same fate.

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[i] https://cardiovascularcoalition.com/our-patients/

[ii] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6113064/

[iii] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6113064/