Abstract P251: The Impact of Clinical Risk Factors on Risk of Peripheral Arterial Disease in Men

Abstract

Background: Previous studies have examined individual risk factors in relation to peripheral arterial disease (PAD) but the combined effects of these factors are largely unknown. We investigated the degree to which clinical risk factors may explain the risk of PAD among men. Methods: We prospectively followed 45,596 men from the Health Professional Follow-up Study without a history of cardiovascular disease at baseline during a 22-year period (1986–2008). We defined four clinical risk factors - smoking, history of type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and hypercholesterolemia - that were updated biennially during follow-up. Cox proportional hazard models were used to compare PAD risk across individual and joint risk factors. Results: During 874,769 person-years of follow-up, 497 confirmed PAD cases occurred. All four clinical risk factors were significantly and independently associated with a higher risk of PAD after multivariate adjustment (Figure). Risk of PAD more than doubled (hazard ratio: 2.14; 95% confidence interval [95% CI]: 1.95–2.35) for each additional risk factor compared with the group free of risk factors. Men without any of the four risk factors had a relative risk of PAD of 0.19 compared with all other men (95% CI: 0.11–0.31). In 96.8% (95% CI: 95.2–98.3%) of the PAD cases, at least one of the four risk factors was present. Overall, 8 out of 10 cases of PAD appeared to be attributable to these four conventional risk factors. Conclusion: The great majority of PAD can be explained by four conventional risk factors. Figure legend: Hazard ratios for incident peripheral arterial disease (PAD) according to individual and joint risk factors. Hazard ratios are adjusted for age, height, aspirin use, family history of myocardial infarction before age 60 y, geographical region, body mass index, physical activity, alcohol consumption (and each of the other three binary clinical risk factors in the individual risk factor analyses).