Associations of symptomatic or asymptomatic peripheral arterial disease with all-cause mortality and cardiovascular mortality

Background: To investigate the rate of all cause and cardiovascular mortality in patients with symptomatic or asymptomatic peripheral arterial disease (PAD) compared to those without PAD. Methods and results: All the subjects were inpatients at high risk of atherosclerosis and enrolled from February to November, 2006. A total of 320 were followed up until an end-point (death) was reached or until February 2010. The mean follow-up time was 37.7 ± 1.5 months. Compared with non-PAD, PAD patients had significantly higher rates of hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and smoking (P