Lipids and Peripheral Arterial Disease.

Peripheral arterial disease (PAD) is associated with a high risk of vascular events [1, 2, 14, 18, 19, 31, 32]. This is true whether PAD is symptomatic or asymptomatic.This risk is so high that PAD is considered as a coronary heart disease (CHD) equivalent [5, 13]. It follows that these patients need to have their modifiable vascular risk fac- tors controlled. Dyslipidaemia, a modifiable vascular risk factor, should be treated aggressively with lipid-lowering drugs, according to international guidelines [5, 13, 16, 37]. The earlier low density lipoprotein-cholesterol (LDL-C) targets {European LDL-C target <96 mg/dl (2.5 mmol/l) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]