Sore legs and feet after walking is a situation that many older people often encounter, perhaps most people feel that this is very normal, the age of well! But did you know? This soreness may indicate an underlying disease, lower limb atherosclerosis occlusive disease. The disease is characterized by an insidious onset in the early stages, but once it reaches the middle and late stages, it can cause severe pain and even necrosis in the affected limbs due to severe ischemia, and a significant number of patients have to undergo amputation, thus seriously affecting their quality of life. Because the disease is often associated with coronary heart disease, diabetes and cerebrovascular disease, it has a high mortality rate. Poor diet structure aggravates atherosclerosis With the improvement of people’s living standard, the per capita life expectancy in China has reached over 70 years old, coupled with the increase in the proportion of fat in the diet structure, the incidence of atherosclerosis has increased significantly. Excess lipid components in the blood are continuously deposited on the arterial walls as irregularly shaped atheromatous plaques, causing the arterial lumen to become increasingly narrow, affecting the blood supply to the limbs and putting the nerves, muscles and skin of the lower limbs and other tissues in an increasingly heavy ischemic environment. In the early stage of the disease, the need for oxygen of the lower limb muscles increases when the patient walks, so it is in a relatively hypoxic state, and then anaerobic metabolism occurs, generating lactic acid and other metabolites to stimulate the nerves and the soreness of the affected limbs, especially the calf muscles. At this time, if the patient sits down for a short break, the soreness can be relieved or disappeared, but the pain will be aggravated after walking a certain distance again, which is called “intermittent claudication”. The more severe the arterial stenosis, the shorter the walking distance the patient can tolerate, until finally losing the ability to walk. In the later stages of the disease, the artery may even be occluded, when the limb is in a state of extreme ischemia even at rest, the nerve endings produce severe pain, called “resting pain”, especially at night, the symptoms are serious, so such patients often can not sleep all night because of severe pain, causing great pain. At the same time, ischemia of skin and muscle tissues gradually loses its vitality, resulting in ulcers or black gangrene of the affected foot, especially the toes, and repeated infections of the necrotic areas are often uncontrollable with general drugs, resulting in the so-called “old rotten feet”. Early detection, early treatment As with most diseases, the treatment of lower extremity atherosclerosis occlusive disease should also be early detection and early treatment. In the early stage of arteriosclerosis stenosis can be treated by anticoagulant, anti-polymerization or vasodilator drugs to promote blood flow and correct tissue ischemia, while appropriate walking exercises can be used to enhance the tolerance of lower extremity tissues to ischemia, and to promote the formation and opening of collateral vessels around the occluded artery to play a role in alleviating the disease. Once the disease reaches the stage of “resting pain” or foot gangrene, the patient should be seen by a vascular surgeon as soon as possible, and the main treatment method is to reconstruct the blood supply to the affected limb through surgery. Currently, surgical methods include traditional surgery to replace an occluded artery with an artificial vessel and endoluminal revascularization, each of which has its own indications, with the latter being the direction of development in vascular surgery with its minimally invasive features. However, in general, regardless of the surgical method, the current treatment results are not yet very satisfactory. Therefore, early detection of the signs of lower extremity atherosclerosis and early diagnosis and treatment are of great benefit.