Potentially undiagnosed cognitive impairment in patients with peripheral arterial disease: A systematic review of the literature

Introduction: It is purported that patients with peripheral arterial disease (PAD) may have impaired cognitive function due to concomitant cerebrovascular disease. Such disease may be clinically unrecognized but can impact on a patient's recovery and prognosis. The purpose of this systematic review was to interrogate the body of published evidence on undiagnosed cognitive impairment in PAD patients.Methods: A search strategy encompassing MEDLINE, Scopus, and the Cochrane database was developed to identify peer-reviewed articles examining rates of undiagnosed cognitive impairment in patients with PAD. The following search terms were used: 'PAD'; 'PVD'; 'dementia'; 'peripheral arterial disease'; 'peripheral vascular disease'; 'cognitive impair-ment'; 'alzheimer's disease' and 'cogniti*'. Our primary outcome was the incidence of previously undiagnosed cognitive impairment in patients with PAD.Results: The initial search yielded 1492 titles. After removal of duplicates, 961 abstracts were screened to ascertain if they were eligible for inclusion. Abstract review yielded 62 full texts for further evaluation. Eight case-control studies consisting of 1161 patients were included. Analysis of these studies revealed that PAD patients performed significantly worse than controls on a variety of neuropsychological measures.Conclusion: Our review indicated that PAD patients are more likely to suffer with undiag-nosed cognitive impairment than healthy controls. (c) 2021 Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh (Scottish charity number SC005317) and Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

The review found that patients with PAD are more likely to have undiagnosed cognitive impairment compared to healthy controls, and they perform significantly worse on neuropsychological measures.