For many, the first noticeable symptom of PAD is a painful cramping of leg muscles during walking called intermittent claudication (IC). When a person rests, the cramping goes away. This leg pain can be severe enough to deter a person from normal walking.
Some individuals will not feel cramping or pain but might feel a numbness, weakness or heaviness in the muscles.
You may not always feel pain; instead you may feel a tightness, heaviness, cramping, or weakness in your leg with activity. IC often occurs more quickly if you walk uphill or up a flight of stairs. Over time, you may begin to feel IC at shorter walking distances.
Only about 50 percent of the people with leg artery disease have blockages severe enough to experience IC.
Critical limb ischemia is a symptom that you may experience if you have advanced peripheral artery disease. This occurs when your legs do not get enough oxygen even when you are resting. With critical limb ischemia, you may experience pain in your feet or in your toes even when you are not walking.
In severe peripheral artery disease, you may develop painful sores on your toes or feet. If the circulation in your leg does not improve, these ulcers can start as dry, gray, or black sores, and eventually become dead tissue (called gangrene).
In patients whose PAD is more severe, insufficient blood flow to the feet and legs may cause a burning/aching pain in the feet and toes while resting.
The pain will occur particularly at night while lying flat. Other symptoms include
♣ Cooling of skin in specific areas of legs or feet
♣ Color changes in the skin and loss of hair
♣ Toe and foot sores that do not heal Silent PAD
Many people are affected by PAD yet they do not have symptoms. These individuals are at a high risk for suffering an early heart attack or stroke. Research has proven that the life expectancy for a person with PAD is greatly reduced.
For example, the risk of dying from heart disease is six times higher for those with PAD compared to those without.
Therefore, it is important to discuss the possibility of PAD with a health care professional if someone has several of the risk factors for PAD.
