Peripheral artery disease care at Mayo Clinic

Your Mayo Clinic care team

At Mayo Clinic, a team of vascular specialists, vascular and endovascular surgeons, cardiologists, and others work together to provide exactly the care you need. Each Mayo Clinic location offers a vascular center staffed by healthcare professionals trained in vascular diseases.

  • Collaborative approach. At Mayo Clinic, your care is discussed among the team members. Appointments are coordinated. Test results are available quickly. Your healthcare team works together to determine the most appropriate treatment for you. This collaborative approach means healthcare professionals can often evaluate you and develop a treatment plan within 2 to 3 days.
  • Advanced diagnosis and treatment. Mayo Clinic patients have access to the latest imaging and diagnostic tools available.
  • Innovative research. Mayo Clinic healthcare professionals have access to advanced research and laboratory facilities. They are constantly seeking new medical knowledge and treatments for people with peripheral artery disease (PAD).

What is peripheral artery disease?

Peripheral artery disease (PAD) is a common condition. It's often treated with medicines and a walking program. But severe PAD can lead to complications, including gangrene. In this video, Mayo Clinic vascular surgeons talk about the symptoms and when surgery may be needed.

A lot of people have it and might not even know that they have it. Peripheral arterial disease is a disease process that doesn't discriminate. It impacts all different classes, ages, races of people throughout the world, affecting upwards of 5 to 6 million people in the United States alone.

PAD or peripheral arterial disease represents a chronic medical condition by which patients have plaque buildup inside the blood vessels, which limits the blood flow to their legs. Classic symptoms are pain in the calves with walking that goes away after you sit down. It starts again when you walk.

We can treat that just with medical management and a walking program. When peripheral arterial disease gets more severe, patients can notice things like pain at rest.

And the more advanced stage, called critical limb threatening ischemia, is where you start having wounds and gangrene on the feet.

It's the most severe type of arterial disease in the legs, and if that goes untreated, then it can lead to amputation.

This is a marker of your overall cardiovascular health. I can't say enough about how important it is to care for peripheral arterial disease. Surgery alone does not provide lasting benefits to these patients. It is a chronic condition, and so commitment to medical and lifestyle therapies is lifelong.

Mayo Clinic is one of the best places to have treatment for arterial disease because we really treat the disease globally, and we do it very, very well.

We make it easy for you to meet all these different specialists to understand why it's important to have all these different issues addressed under one roof. This includes not just a vascular surgeon, but a dietician, a social worker, a nicotine cessation counselor, a diabetologist, a wound care expert, a cardiovascular medicine expert, usually a cardiologist. So the point to take home is that you're not just coming to Mayo Clinic to treat your PAD, you're coming to Mayo Clinic to treat all the underlying reasons you developed PAD.

One of the best things patients can do to treat their arterial disease is to to break those really tough habits like quitting smoking and starting to walk more and focusing on a healthier diet.

For critical limb threatening ischemia, the indication is more obvious. If we don't perform vascular surgery, you are at an extremely high risk of losing that limb.

As vascular surgeons, our goal is to keep people's limbs as long as possible, and we do whatever we can from surgery to wound care, to optimizing medical care and other treatment modalities. So for these individuals, we do a surgical intervention to restore inline blood flow down to the feet.

There exists a variety of both open and minimally invasive surgeries to treat the symptoms of peripheral arterial disease. We have access to state-of-the-art hybrid surgical suites. We have a very robust research arm to our PAD practice from early detection of PAD leading to better screening, developing medical treatments to cure peripheral arterial disease.

We have all the technology that's necessary to treat arterial disease on the shelf so we can really treat all patients who come in with the best possible treatments that exist. It's just that you need to be evaluated appropriately and have the right testing done so that the treatment can be optimized for you.

So when you come to Mayo Clinic, please know that you are everything that matters to us.

Expertise and rankings

Mayo Clinic provides comprehensive care for more than 5,500 people with peripheral artery disease each year.

Each Mayo Clinic location offers care for adults with peripheral artery disease and other vascular diseases. Mayo Clinic healthcare professionals are experts at treating peripheral artery disease with medicines as well as treatments such as angioplasty and stenting and bypass graft surgery.

Nationally recognized expertise

Mayo Clinic campuses are nationally recognized for expertise in cardiology and cardiovascular surgery:

  • Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, Mayo Clinic in Phoenix/Scottsdale, Arizona, and Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, are ranked among the Best Hospitals for heart and heart surgery by U.S. News & World Report.
  • Mayo Clinic Children's Center in Rochester is ranked the No. 1 hospital in Minnesota, and the five-state region of Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin, according to U.S. News & World Report's 2024-2025 "Best Children's Hospitals" rankings.

Learn more about Mayo Clinic's cardiovascular surgery and cardiovascular medicine departments' expertise and rankings.

Locations, travel and lodging

Mayo Clinic has major campuses in Phoenix and Scottsdale, Arizona; Jacksonville, Florida; and Rochester, Minnesota. The Mayo Clinic Health System has dozens of locations in several states.

For more information on visiting Mayo Clinic, choose your location below:

Costs and insurance

Mayo Clinic works with hundreds of insurance companies and is an in-network provider for millions of people.

In most cases, Mayo Clinic doesn't require a physician referral. Some insurers require referrals or may have additional requirements for certain medical care. All appointments are prioritized on the basis of medical need.

Learn more about appointments at Mayo Clinic.

Please contact your insurance company to verify medical coverage and to obtain any needed authorization prior to your visit. Often, your insurer's customer service number is printed on the back of your insurance card.

More information about billing and insurance:

Mayo Clinic in Arizona, Florida and Minnesota

Mayo Clinic Health System

Aug. 09, 2024

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