What is claudication?

Hello Mr Jaffer, can you please tell us what is claudication? Certainly, so intermittent claudication due to peripheral vascular disease is pain in your calves or your calves and your thighs or your calves and your thighs and your buttocks when you walk. Typically you hit a wall in terms of the distance you can walk and you just can't walk anymore, you're stopped because of the pain in the muscles and typically when you stop walking you can just stand still, the pain ebbs away over a few minutes and then you can carry on walking probably a similar distance. And those symptoms are caused by narrowing of the arteries to the legs. That narrowing of the arteries to the legs is caused by a disease called atherosclerosis. Now that's affecting the legs in terms of the symptoms you're getting at that particular point in time but it's a disease that affects the whole body. So atherosclerosis can affect arteries to the kidneys to the guts to the heart and to the brain. So it's really important to appreciate that claudication is a symptom which is not a critical emergency in terms of time but it's very much a wake-up call or alarm bell ringing that your body is suffering from atherosclerosis and you're at risk of all sorts of complications and we should do what we can to minimize those risks.