Differences between vascular and neurogenic claudication

So Mr. Jaffer, can you please tell us the difference between neurogenic and vascular claudication? Yeah, absolutely. Two conditions with very similar presentations in terms of symptoms, what you feel, and sometimes very difficult to tease these two apart. So in terms of vascular claudication, generally speaking all you have to do is stop and the pain eventually wears off after a couple of minutes. With neurogenic or spinal claudication due to some nerve impingement in sciatica, often people talk about having to either bend over or sit down to relieve the pain. So simply standing up or propping themselves up against a wall generally doesn't relieve the pain. That's because there's a nerve impingement involved there. In terms of who would get spinal claudication or neurogenic claudication versus vascular claudication, you have to look at those risk factors to do with diabetes, kidney failure, high blood pressure, being a smoker, having high cholesterol and the patient with neurogenic or spinal claudication may well not have those risk factors. The real differentiation comes on testing and we can do a number of tests to differentiate the two conditions ranging from AVPI to a vascular duplex scan and even MRI sometimes to evaluate the spine in more detail.