Lifestyle

5 Signs of Peripheral Artery Disease Most People Blame on Aging Legs

By Curtis Jones · September 18, 2026

Nearly 12 million American adults over 40 have peripheral artery disease. Most don’t know it. The condition — called PAD — is a hardening and narrowing of the arteries that carry blood to the legs and feet, and its warning signs are so subtle that most people chalk them up to age, arthritis, or being out of shape. Untreated, PAD can lead to amputation. Vascular surgeons estimate it contributes to roughly 400 lost limbs a day in the United States.

Here are the five signs of PAD most often blamed on aging legs.

Leg pain or cramping that starts when you walk and stops when you rest. This is the classic PAD symptom, and it has a medical name: intermittent claudication. It shows up as pain, cramping, numbness, or fatigue in the calves, thighs, or buttocks that starts during physical activity like walking or climbing stairs and typically stops within 10 minutes of stopping, the Cleveland Clinic reports. If your legs consistently ache after a specific walking distance, that’s not “getting older” — that’s your muscles running out of oxygen because a narrowed artery can’t deliver enough blood.

Numbness or weakness in one leg but not the other. PAD often develops asymmetrically — worse in one leg than the other. If one foot goes numb walking around the grocery store while the other feels fine, or if one leg gives out on stairs while the other handles them, that’s a sign of unequal blood flow, not general aging.

A foot that’s noticeably colder than the other. Reduced blood flow shows up as reduced temperature. If one foot is consistently colder than the other — you can feel it when you sit on the couch, or your partner mentions it in bed — get evaluated. Skin color changes (paleness, bluish tint) in the affected foot are another circulation clue.

Sores or cuts on your feet that won’t heal. Blood carries oxygen and immune cells that repair damaged tissue. When the arteries feeding your feet are narrowed, wounds heal slowly or not at all. A cut on the foot that hasn’t closed after two weeks, or a “diabetic ulcer” that keeps returning, may point to underlying PAD rather than just diabetes, Yale Medicine notes. Left untreated, non-healing wounds can progress to gangrene.

Leg pain that wakes you up at night. In more advanced PAD, the pain no longer waits for exercise — it comes on at rest, often at night when your legs are elevated in bed and gravity isn’t helping blood reach them. Many people find relief by hanging the leg off the side of the bed. That specific pattern — pain at rest, relief with the leg down — is a serious sign that PAD has progressed and needs urgent evaluation.

PAD is a warning about the rest of your arteries. It’s atherosclerosis in the legs, and the same process is usually happening in the arteries feeding your heart and brain. The American Heart Association reports that leg pain from PAD often signals the same plaque buildup that causes heart attacks and strokes, which is why the condition is a major cardiovascular risk marker, not just a leg problem.

Diagnosis is simple. A test called an ankle-brachial index compares blood pressure in your ankle to blood pressure in your arm and takes a few minutes. If your doctor hasn’t ordered one and you have any combination of the symptoms above, ask.

“A lot of the time when patients complain of leg pain, it is misdiagnosed as something else, such as back pain.”

That’s University of Michigan vascular surgeon Dr. Katherine Gallagher, speaking to the Society for Vascular Surgery. Ask for the test.