Context

Peripheral arterial disease (PAD) is prevalent in more than 12% of people who are at least 65 years of age. In addition to having high cardiovascular risk, many patients with PAD are physically limited by ambulatory leg pain known as claudication. An important clinical goal for patients with claudication is to regain lost physical function through exercise rehabilitation. Medically supervised exercise programmes are efficacious for clinical management of claudication, as improvements are noted for the walking time (or distance) to the onset of pain or to maximal leg pain. However, there are limitations associated with structured, on-site and supervised exercise programmes which include having relatively few programmes available, having the necessary resources related to staffing and equipment to adequately serve many patients and primarily serving only those patients who live near the facility. This study was designed to examine the efficacy of supervised exercise conducted using a network of …