Peripheral Arterial Disease

Peripheral arterial disease include disease all disorders involving carotid artery, vertebral artery, subclavian artery brached out from aortic arch, upper extremities arteries, thoracoabdominal aorta, its visceral arteries and lower extremities arteries. Rapid advances in vascular surgery (especially arterial surgery) began after World War II, beginning with the treatment of arterial lesions with vascular repair and with bypass procedures, and vascular diseases previously noted beyond the surgical treatment can be corrected by recent vascular surgery. This evolution of vascular surgery has attributed to the development of arteriography, anesthesia, blood transfusion, antibiotics, anticoagulation and synthetic graft materials. These advanced vascular surgical techniques have yielded a cornerstone for the development of the modern organ transplantations. Recently, the incidence of vascular diseases in Korea increased remarkably than before and clinicians should pay attention to make early diagnosis and to perform appropriate treatment for these diseases. Because the detailed descriptions regarding all these vascular diseases in is limited space are difficult, the author would like to describe clinical aspect of the commonly encountered peripheral arterial diseases such as atherosclerotic occlusive disease, abdominal aortic aneurysm, diabetic foot, cerebrovascular disease, Buerger's disease of lower extremities with introducing clinical manifestation of acute and chronic peripheral arterial occlusive disease.