Associations of symptomatic or asymptomatic peripheral arterial disease with all-cause mortality and cardiovascular mortality

Background: To investigate the rate of all cause and cardiovascular mortality in patients with symptomatic or asymptomatic peripheral arterial disease (PAD) compared to those without PAD. Methods and results: All the subjects were inpatients at high risk of atherosclerosis and enrolled from February to November, 2006. A total of 320 were followed up until an end-point (death) was reached or until February 2010. The mean follow-up time was 37.7 1.5 months. Compared with non-PAD, PAD patients had significantly higher rates of hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and smoking (P < 0.01). Those with symptomatic and asymptomatic PAD had a much higher all cause (37.5 A and 23.0 A vs. 12.1 A) and cardiovascular mortality (18.8 A and 13.8 A vs. 6.7 A) compared to those without PAD (P < 0.001). The symptomatic PAD patients were 1.831 times (95 A CI: 1.222-2.741) as likely to die as those without PAD, and 1.646 times (95 A CI: 1.301-2.083) in asymptomatic PAD patients after adjusting for other factors. Those with symptomatic or asymptomatic PAD were more than twice as likely to die of CVD as those without PAD (RR: 2.248, 95% CI: 1.366-3.698 and RR: 2.105, 95% CI: 1.566-2.831, respectively). Conclusions: PAD was associated with a higher all cause and cardiovascular mortality whether or not PAD is symptomatic. (C) 2011 Egyptian Society of Cardiology. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.