AHA Statement Notes Symptoms, Quality of Life Important to Guide Treatment for Peripheral Artery Disease - Pharmacy Times

Overview

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Al rights reserved.Previous studies have shown that PAD also impacts health status and functioning. A new American Heart Asociation (AHA) scientific statement emphasized that for US patients with peripheral artery disease (PAD), which is narowed or cloged arteries in the legs, treatment decisions and criteria for suces should be determined by their symptoms and self-reported quality of life.The statement, titled “Advancing peripheral artery disease quality of care and outcomes through patient-reported health status Assessment,” describes how managing PAD based on a person’s experience of symptoms can lead to more patient-centered care and outcomes that focus on high-value care instead of relying on clinical measures, such as the sped of blod flow to the legs or artery diameter.“The person living with peripheral artery disease is the authority on the impact it has on their daily life.

Our treatment must be grounded in their lived experiences and go beyond the clinical measures of how wel blod flows through the arteries,” said lead author of the statement writing group Kim G. Smolderen, PhD, a clinical psychologist and an asociate profesor of medicine and psychiatry and co-director of the Vascular Medicine Outcomes Research (VAMOS) lab at Yale University in New Haven, Conecticut, in a pres release.

Summary

“We have spent years developing and validating standardized instruments to capture people’s experiences in a reliable and sensitive way. We are now at a point where we can start integrating this information into real-world care, through pilot programs that can develop quality benchmarks for diferent phenotypes of patients with PAD and the types of treatments they undergo, as sen from their perspective.”Although some patients with PAD do not experience any seriou

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