Peripheral Artery Disease Treatments in Corbin

Baptist Health Corbin: Peripheral Artery Disease Treatments

Learn more about treatments for peripheral artery disease, a vascular condition that can affect your quality of life. Baptist Health offers same-day outpatient procedures to remove blockages and relieve leg pain.

Peripheral Artery Disease Treatments HealthTalks Transcript

Mirza Ahmed, MD
Peripheral vascular disease is the hardening of the arteries in lower extremities, primarily, although you can have blockage built up in other parts of the body. Primarily, we focus on treating the blockages that build up in the legs, leading to a lack of blood flow.

The easy treatment in the very early stages is basically diet, exercise, and keeping a good walking routine. Primarily, that allows what we call “helping arteries” or “collateral circulation” to build up. Many patients will have life-limiting symptoms, so they cannot walk more than a block, and they are usually very active, and they want to have treatment.

In those circumstances, we can treat it similar to what we do in the heart, using a balloon or a stent and sometimes procedures like atherectomy, which essentially creates a way for us to shave off part of the blockage and remove it out of the body. This allows these blockages to open up and re-establish the blood flow, which subsequently allows those symptoms to go away.

All the procedures that we do peripheral vascular are outpatient same-day procedures, so they come in the morning and leave in the evening. You don’t have to spend the night in the hospital.

Contact a Baptist Health location to schedule an appointment.