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How Vascular Disease Affects Your Body and Why It Matters
Interviewer: Vascular disease, going to give you the rundown. What is it? What are the symptoms? Is it bad? And what can you do about it?
Dr. Benjamin Brooke, Assistant Professor of Surgery in the Division of Vascular Surgery at the University Utah School of Medicine. Vascular disease - let's talk about that for a couple seconds. First of all, is vascular disease a pretty big umbrella of things that could happen to a person?
Dr. Brooke: Yes, it is. The vascular system, first of all, can involve both arterial disease as well as venous disease. Most people think of it from the arterial perspective because that's the kind of vascular disease that can lead to significant problems with loss of blood flow, leading to organ damage, such as people having to lose their legs or having a heart attack or having a stroke. It's a pretty big umbrella.
Interviewer: I was going to ask you how serious vascular disease is, but heart attacks, strokes, and losing your legs - that's pretty serious stuff.
Dr. Brooke: It's one of those things that doesn't happen overnight. So vascular disease is the accumulation of many risk factors over a person's lifetime. Age is a risk factor. Smoking is a risk factor. Being a diabetic is a risk factor. And then just sort of sedentary lifestyle is also another big risk factor.
Interviewer: What exactly is vascular disease? Is it essentially that you're just not getting the blood flow properly around your body?
Dr. Brooke: Well, vascular disease is more of a function of the blood vessels themselves that start to essentially misbehave. So either you develop blockages or occlusion of a blood vessel, or the vessel wall becomes weakened, and it can develop what we call an aneurysm. It's almost kind of like a balloon expanding, and if it gets to a certain point, it's just going to rupture. It can lead to somebody bleeding to death.
Interviewer: So blockages and weakness, those are the two main things that you see.
Dr. Brooke: Correct, yeah.
Causes of Vascular Disease
How Lifestyle Choices Influence Your Blood Vessel ÐÇ¿Õ´«Ã½
Interviewer: And what causes that? Is it something I'm doing? Is it that I'm not eating the right foods? Am I eating the wrong foods? Do I need to move around more?
Dr. Brooke: Well, it's a combination of a lot of things. If you're not exercising a lot and keeping your vessels healthy, then that can lead to it. Smoking is probably the biggest risk factor that we see from a vascular disease standpoint. And really what smoking does is it causes a chronic inflammation of the blood vessel wall. That inflammation can either lead to the accumulation of what we want to say artifact and cholesterol, or it can be blood cells, or it can be a blood clot that forms inside of the artery, or the things that make up the vessel wall can become weakened, and then that's when an aneurysm forms. It's that the blood vessel just doesn't have the same strength as it used to, and that's why it can expand.
Interviewer: It seems like a lot of causes of a lot of health issues come down to two things.
Dr. Brooke: Right.
Interviewer: One, smoking. Two, obesity. Does obesity play a factor in vascular disease?
Dr. Brooke: It can. I'd actually say diabetes is the other big thing. And diabetes can be related to obesity that's linked to that, but I'd say smoking and diabetes are the two big risk factors that we see.
The Role of Genetics in Vascular Disease
Interviewer: Genetics, does that play a factor as well?
Dr. Brooke: Absolutely. Diabetes is clearly something that has been found to have a hereditary component.
Warning Signs of Blocked Arteries: When to Take Action
Interviewer: So this kind of sounds terrifying. Are there any symptoms that I would see to give me a little advanced warning so I could come and see an individual like you?
Dr. Brooke: Well, it kind of depends on where the vascular disease is. And what we usually tell people is that if you have vascular disease in one part of your body, there is a chance you might have it in another. So if you are developing what we call a claudication or crampy muscle pain in your legs when you walk, most people can't walk more than a block without having this pain. They stop, they rest, it gets better, then they start walking again, it comes on and very reproducible. That kind of pain can mean that you've got blood vessel blockages, but it can also mean that you have blood vessel blockages in other parts of your body, such as your heart, in the neck arteries, and in other areas that could be also critical but just aren't having symptoms. So it's sometimes a marker of worse things to come, and you need to seek some diagnostic workup.
Interviewer: Is that the main symptom, the leg issue?
Dr. Brooke: Some people will develop chest pain, and that could mean that their coronary arteries are blocked, but at the same time, when their coronary arteries are blocked, it could also mean that they have some vascular disease in their leg as well.
Treatment Options: When to See a Doctor and What to Expect
Interviewer: So what are some of the treatments that people could . . .
Dr. Brooke: Well, in a lot of patients, we like to start off being conservative if we can. We don't like to just rush into doing an operation. We like to talk to patients about their lifestyles and try to encourage any lifestyle changes that might help their blood vessel circulation. For people with lower extremity blood vessel disease, we encourage a regimented exercise program, and that means going out and at least walking 30 minutes to 60 minutes a day, but doing that every day.
We also encourage making sure that people are on the right medications. For most people over the age of 60, that means taking a daily aspirin. There are other medications, such as stat medications. People have heard of Lipitor, most likely. Those medications have been shown to be effective for reducing a lot of the inflammation that we find in blood vessels that lead to these blockages and problems.
Interviewer: If you could get on the mountain and scream the one message to anybody listening, what would that be?
Dr. Brooke: Seek treatment and consultation early because if you start having any symptoms, the worse thing you can do is just to kind of ignore it or brush it off because I think the problem we see is that people have symptoms, and they kind of brush them off. And then several years later, they present, and they've got a more serious problem that requires an urgent operation. And we'd rather do this in a way that doesn't have to involve more drastic measures like that.
updated: March 11, 2025
originally published: September 16, 2014