sir today 24

Welcome to SIR Today, your guide to the events, programming and faculty that make the SIR annual meeting a memorable meeting for the interventional radiology community each year. Watch for more preview content to be published in the coming weeks, as well as daily previews and recaps of scientific sessions, award presentations, and during the week of the meeting in March. For the latest details on presenters, times and locations, refer to the SIR 2024 website and the annual meeting mobile app.

The six steps to reducing PAD

PAD National Action Plan presented yesterday

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SIR has joined the mission to improve the awareness, diagnosis and treatment of peripheral arterial disease (PAD). During Sunday’s Opening Plenary, Sanjay Misra, MD, FAHA, FSIR, presented the PAD National Action Plan (NAP), a multisociety collaborative effort with the American Heart Association that seeks to staunch the spread of PAD and raise public awareness about the disease state.

According to the AHA, between 8-10 million people in the United States are afflicted with PAD, and there are approximately 150,000 resulting leg amputations performed in the country each year. Rural, Black and Native American communities are disproportionately impacted, as well as individuals of low socioeconomic status. As the U.S. population ages, PAD prevalence may actually triple, with some estimates projecting that 19 million people will have PAD by 2050.

SIR, represented by Dr. Misra and Laura Findeiss, MD, FSIR, has joined over 25 organizations in committing to an action plan that comprises of six main goals:

  1. Reach people with PAD and those at risk for PAD by improving public awareness of PAD symptoms and diagnosis.
  2. Enhance professional education for multidisciplinary health care professionals who care for people with PAD.
  3. Activate health care systems to provide enhanced programs for the detection and treatment of PAD patients, with a focus on understanding and addressing patient centered outcomes.
  4. Reduce the rates of nontraumatic lower extremity amputations related to PAD through public outcome reporting and public health interventions.
  5. Increase and sustain research to better understand prevention, diagnosis and treatment of PAD.
  6. Coordinate PAD advocacy efforts to shape national policy and improve health outcomes.

During his presentation, Dr. Misra emphasized that awareness is crucial, since many patients don’t know common symptoms of PAD. According to the AHA, a 2006 survey found that only 26% of respondents were familiar with PAD, and only 14% knew PAD could lead to amputation.

“Even some podiatrists don’t know how prevalent PAD is,” Dr. Misra said. To combat this lack of awareness, the action plan leaders suggests creating a standardized curriculum that can be disseminated and used to educate health care providers best placed to prevent or catch early PAD, such as physicians, nurses, advanced practice providers, clinical exercise physiologists, vascular technologists and nutritionists.

According to Dr. Misra, the goal of the action plan is to improve the incidence of PAD by 20% by 2030.

“This is a transformative time for PAD,” he said. “The action plan is a blueprint for how we will approach PAD, and it encompasses every stage from patient diagnosis to research. This will show us the way forward to addressing the pandemic of PAD.”

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