For individuals with lower extremity peripheral artery disease or PAD, physical, mental, and societal factors can severely impact long-term health outcomes. An expert perspective titled, “Integrating Psychosocial Care in the Management of Patients with Vascular Disease,” was published online in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology with support from the American Heart Association's Council on Peripheral Vascular Disease (PVD).
Led by Carlos Mena-Hurtado, MD, and Kim G. Smolderen, PhD, co-directors of the Vascular Medicine Outcomes Program, the PVD Council’s expert perspective provides a call to action to raise awareness, reduce stigma, and promote integrated care approaches, along with policy and advocacy efforts to tackle the co-existing mental health burden as part of the treatment of PAD.
Psychosocial Care for the Management of Patients with Vascular Disease
The expert perspective outlines interventions to improve PAD outcomes and patient satisfaction. The document aims to increase awareness about mental health, racial, gender, socioeconomic, and geographical disparities. For example, younger patients with poor diet or conditions such as depression and anxiety are more likely to experience a major amputation, longer length of stay, and increased costs.
- Policy changes at the state and national level are needed. Interprofessional partnerships with organizations such as the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association must be formed to promote further advocacy and policy changes.
- The experts support advanced subspeciality training across medical disciplines such as behavioral health and vascular care, and co-learning experiences of delivering integrated care.
- Finally, efforts to increase awareness and research opportunities on psychosocial care among health care providers and care teams will be essential.
Other study authors included Zainab Samaan, PhD from McMaster University; Barbara Ward-Zimmerman, PhD from CT Psychological Association’s Health Care Reform Task Force; Lisa Fucito, PhD from Yale University; Philip Goodney, MD, MS from Dartmouth; Viet Le, PA-C from Intermountain Heart Institute; Hussein Abu Daya, MD, MSHA from University of Alabama at Birmingham; Demetria M. McNeal, PhD, MBA and Marc Bonaca, MD, MPH, from University of Colorado.