Global, regional, and national prevalence and risk factors for peripheral artery disease in 2015: an updated systematic review and analysis

Peripheral artery disease is a major cardiovascular disease that affected 202 million people worldwide in 2010. In the past decade, new epidemiological data on peripheral artery disease have emerged, enabling us to provide updated estimates of the prevalence and risk factors for peripheral artery disease globally and regionally and, for the first time, nationally.

For this systematic review and analysis, we did a comprehensive literature search for studies reporting on the prevalence of peripheral artery disease in the general population that were published between Jan 1, 2011, and April 30, 2019, in PubMed, MEDLINE, Embase, the Global Health database, CINAHL, the Global Health Library, the Allied and Complementary Medicine Database, and ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global. We also included the Global Peripheral Artery Disease Study of 2013 and the China Peripheral Artery Disease Study as sources. Peripheral artery disease had to be defined as an ankle-brachial index lower than or equal to 0·90. With a purpose-built data collection form, data on study characteristics, sample characteristics, prevalence, and risk factors were abstracted from all the included studies identified from the sources. Age-specific and sex-specific prevalence of peripheral artery disease was estimated in both high-income countries (HICs) and low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs). We also did random-effects meta-analyses to pool the odds ratios of 30 risk factors for peripheral artery disease in HICs and LMICs. UN population data were used to generate the number of people affected by the disease in 2015. Finally, we derived the regional and national numbers of people with peripheral artery disease on the basis of a risk factor-based model.