The earliest symptom of lower limb atherosclerosis is called “intermittent claudication”, which is characterized by pain in the lower leg after walking for a while, and then being able to continue walking after a short rest. The pain can eventually develop into pain when walking 100 or 50 meters, stopping and walking. Elderly people with this symptom, especially men aged 50-70, cannot be considered as an aging phenomenon, but most likely due to narrowing or occlusion of the lumen caused by arteriosclerosis of the lower limbs, which is caused by ischemia of the muscles of the lower limbs. This is a signal to the patient. It is time for you to go to a hospital vascular surgery clinic for a checkup and examination. How to recognize the presence of lower extremity artery occlusion Leg pain when walking is not always lower extremity atherosclerosis occlusive disease. Patients with lower extremity arteriosclerosis occlusive disease have two characteristics of leg pain when walking: namely, the location of the pain is in the calf and pain in the muscle area of the calf belly. The pain is characterized by the ability to walk again after resting for a few minutes, and the pain arises again after walking a certain distance; the symptoms of patients with thrombo-occlusive vasculitis can also be leg pain when walking, which is almost identical to the symptoms of lower extremity atherosclerosis occlusion. The main point is that both diseases are arterial blockages, so physicians need to differentiate them from age, arteriography, etc. If the physician feels the dorsalis pedis artery during the examination and tells you that the dorsalis pedis artery is pulsating normally, lower limb arteriosclerosis occlusion can be completely excluded. How to check yourself If you have symptoms of “intermittent claudication”, you may also try to feel the pulsation of the dorsalis pedis artery yourself. The dorsalis pedis artery is located on the back of the foot between the big toe and the second toe, use your index finger to gently press on this part of the back of the foot, you can feel the pulsation of the artery. If you find that you cannot feel the dorsalis pedis artery on one side, the skin temperature of the foot is cooler than the opposite side, and there is pain on the same side of the calf when walking, you need to go to the hospital for further examination. Of course, there are many diseases that cause pain in the lower limbs, and not all of them are necessarily arterial occlusions. After a detailed examination by a physician, the cause of lower limb pain can be clarified. How to treat arteriosclerosis occlusive disease Depending on the stage of the disease and the specific examination results, medication, surgery and interventional treatment can be used. Drug treatment includes the application of various types of Chinese and Western drugs such as anti-platelet adhesion, cholesterol-lowering, vasodilating, anticoagulation, and fiber-lowering. Surgical treatment includes different surgical methods according to the location and degree of lesion, including abdominal aorta-iliac or femoral artery artificial vessel graft; subclavian artery-femoral artery artificial vessel graft; femoral artery-opposite femoral artery artificial vessel or saphenous vein graft; femoral artery-roughe artery artificial vessel or saphenous vein graft; femoral artery-roughe artery artificial vessel or saphenous vein graft. -The procedure is performed on the femoral artery and the contralateral femoral artery or saphenous vein. Interventional treatment refers to endoluminal dilatation and angioplasty, endarterectomy, and intra-arterial stent fixation.