The writing committee says collaborative efforts and patient-level perspective can improve management of pain in this population.
Multimodal team-based pain management is needed in the care of patients with PAD to address the lived experience and improve outcomes, a scientific statement from the American Heart Association contends.
“A lot of the treatments for PAD are focused on improving the perfusion in the leg and treating cardiovascular risk factors and metabolic risk factors, but we know that the problem of pain and the processing of pain doesn’t happen in your leg,” said writing committee chair Kim G. Smolderen, PhD (Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT). “It’s really a complex interplay of multiple factors that determine how intense you feel pain, how frequent you feel it, and what…