Pressure index is important in peripheral arterial disease

doi:10.1136/bmj.326.7403.1399

BMJ 2003;326:1399 (21 June), doi:10.1136/bmj.326.7403.1399

Letter

Pressure index is important in peripheral arterial disease

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR—The clinical review by Burns et al on managing peripheral arterial disease in primary care tackles an importantarea of practice.¹ Despite guidelines from the Departmentof Health,² patients with this condition receive suboptimalcare. In addition, lack of awareness of the diagnosis and treatmentof this disease by patients and primary care doctors was blamedfor poor rates of best medical treatment among this group ofpatients in North America.³

Management starts with diagnosis, of which an accurate ankle-brachial pressure index is an important component. It is a cheap testand provides hard evidence of vascular disease—a correlationbetween pressure index and overall cardiovascular risk exists.We were disappointed to see no mention of this in the review.

Work by our unit on a cohort of 500 consecutive patients referredby general practitioners showed a diagnostic accuracy of 70%for peripheral arterial disease—fewer than 5% of referrals. . . [Full text of this article]

Robert E Brightwell, research fellow in vascular surgery, Isam S Osman, consultant vascular surgeon

Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust, Ipswich IP4 5PD

CiteULike

Complore

Connotea

Del.icio.us Add to Digg

Digg

StumbleUpon Add to Technorati

Technorati What's this?

Relevant Article

Management of peripheral arterial disease in primary care: Paul Burns, Stephen Gough, and Andrew W Bradbury
BMJ 2003 326: 584-588. [Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]