Cardiovascular Risk Factors - Association with Lower Extremity Versus Coronary Artery Disease

Atherosclerosis is the main cause of lower extremity artery disease (LEAD) and coronary artery disease (CAD). These two arterial territories share the major cardiovascular risk factors: smoking, hypertension, dyslipidaemia and diabetes. Current guidelines draw attention to other possible risk factors: homocysteine level, inflammation markers (e.g. high-sensitive C reactive-protein (CRP), interleukin 6) and chronic kidney disease (CKD.) The objective of this study was to evaluate the cardiovascular risk factors strength association with LEAD and CAD on a study population of 203 patients. Our study concluded that smoking seems to be the most powerful risk factor for LEAD, especially for significant lesion in femoral arteries, while diabetes mellitus, hypertension and CKD were significantly associated with CAD. The highest chance of association with multivessel-CAD is for diabetes mellitus compared to hypertension and CKD respectively. Moreover, in diabetic patients the percent of multivessel-CAD was significantly higher than the percent of single-CAD and non-significant CAD.