Study explains how walking and exercise help patients with peripheral artery disease (USA)

Peripheral artery disease (PAD) affects 5 million individuals in the U.S. and is the leading cause of limb amputations. Doctors have long considered exercise to be the single best therapy for PAD, and now a new study helps explain why. Led by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and published in this week's Online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the findings demonstrate that a protein called PGC-1alpha plays a key role in the process. "Exercise is a staple of healthy living," notes senior author Zoltan Arany, MD, PhD, an investigator in BIDMC's Cardiovascular Institute and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. "One of the many benefits of exercise, endurance exercise in particular, is the generation of new blood vessels in leg muscles." Known as angiogenesis, this naturally occurring process comes to the rescue when an injury or artery blockage leaves normal tissue starved for blood.