This review shows that PAD is not a niche vascular diagnosis but a massive, underrecognized global burden that concentrates sharply in diabetes, kidney disease, stroke, and other high-risk populations while often remaining clinically silent. The full read is worth it because it maps where PAD prevalence is truly highest, why reported rates vary so widely, and which patient groups should trigger much earlier ABI-based case finding.
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Abstract: The aim of this paper is to synthesize current evidence regarding the prevalence of PAD across diverse global populations, identify key independent risk factors, and evaluate the disease burden within specific high-risk clinical cohorts. The review utilises 198 references. The mapped evidence indicates that PAD is a common and growing manifestation of systemic atherosclerosis, with global cases exceeding 113 million by 2021 and prevalence in general adult populations typically ranging from about 1.23% to 13.7%. A consistent signal across topics was the marked concentration of burden in clinically enriched groups, where prevalence reached 41.9% in diabetes, 54% in hemodialysis, and 45.3% in abdominal aortic aneurysm cohorts. The review also highlights that a substantial proportion of disease is asymptomatic and that measured prevalence depends heavily on how PAD is defined and detected, supporting a practical role for targeted ABI-based case finding in high-risk settings rather than reliance on routine clinical recognition alone. At the same time, the wide spread of estimates across regions, comorbidity profiles, and diagnostic approaches suggests that the current evidence map is better interpreted as showing patterns of burden than as providing a single universal prevalence figure. Future research should prioritize standardized PAD ascertainment and harmonized reporting across general and high-risk populations so that prevalence comparisons become more clinically actionable and internationally comparable.
Keywords: Peripheral artery disease; Global prevalence; Type 2 diabetes mellitus; Cardiovascular comorbidities; Risk factors; Elderly population; Lower extremity arterial disease; Global burden of disease; Socioeconomic status; Mortality risk
Review Stats
Final search date and database lock: 2026-04-02 23:44:07 CEST
Plan: Pro (expanded craft tokens; source: PubMed)
Source: PubMed
Total Abstracts/Papers: 2571
Downloaded Abstracts/Papers: 2571
Included original and non-original Abstracts/Papers (all): 1396
Included original Abstracts/Papers (Vote counting by direction of effect): 1282
Reference Index (links used in paper): 198
Total participants (topic deduplicated ΣN): 21312665
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