Why Do You Wake Up at Night Due to Leg Pain?

Leg pain, including leg pain that wakes you up at night, can be caused by many different problems, ranging from a sprain to an ulcer. An unfortunately common cause of severe leg pain is vascular disease, and if your legs hurt because of it, you have more to worry about than just lost sleep.

Heart Vascular and Leg Center, located in Bakersfield, California, specializes in treating vascular disease. Our expert team of vascular specialists, interventional radiologists, and wound care specialists diagnose your leg pain and treat the underlying cause so you can lead the healthiest life possible. Here’s what you need to know about leg pain and the health of your circulatory system.

The most common vascular sources of leg pain and how they’re treated

There are two primary vascular diseases that produce severe leg pain:

1. Chronic venous insufficiency (CVI)

Your heart is an amazing muscle, beating about 100,000 times a day and pumping around 7,200 liters of blood. To allow it to do its job, your body has an intricate circulatory system, composed of arteries that take oxygenated blood from the heart to the body’s organs and tissues, and veins that take the deoxygenated blood from the tissues back to the heart.

To ensure the blood can flow properly against gravity as it returns to the heart, your calf muscles contract to push it forward, and one-way valves in the veins themselves permit only forward-moving flow.

A problem develops when the vein walls become damaged (e.g., high blood pressure) or the valves fail to close properly (e.g., damage from an injury to the leg.) When that happens, blood can flow backward along the path, and it pools around the veins, distending them. The condition is called chronic venous insufficiency, and the results are spider veins (superficial veins), and larger, discolored varicose veins. Both cause pain in the legs due to poor circulation.

Spider veins can best be treated with simple lifestyle changes such as getting regular exercise, maintaining a healthy weight, and not sitting or standing for extended periods.

Medically, they may be treated with sclerotherapy, where the doctor injects an irritating solution into the vein that scars the lining and shuts the vein down; noninvasive laser treatment and radiofrequency treatment to ablate the veins. In all cases, blood is rerouted to healthier veins. Varicose veins are treated much the same way, with the go-to procedure being sclerotherapy.

Other causes of leg pain related to vascular disease are deep vein thrombosis (DVT), a potentially life-threatening condition where a blood clot forms in a deep leg vein; restless legs syndrome, and diabetes-related neuropathy.

2. Peripheral artery disease (PAD)

Healthy arteries contain a smooth lining that promotes steady blood flow and prevents blood from clotting. However, in PAD, plaque builds up inside the artery walls. Plaque is composed of fat, cholesterol, cellular debris, proteins, and calcium. As the plaque builds up, it narrows or blocks the arteries responsible for delivering oxygenated blood to the tissues. When the blood can’t get through, the tissues starve, leading to damaged tissue and, eventually, tissue death. That’s where the leg pain, known in this case as claudication, comes from.

Limb pain from PAD is serious. Studies suggest that 11% of diabetic patients who don’t treat their PAD develop gangrenous tissue, and 22% of those require amputation in a lower limb within one year.

PAD can be treated with high cholesterol medications, high blood pressure medications, and a surgical procedure that involves cleaning out the plaque in the carotid artery to get circulation back to healthy levels.

Both venous insufficiency and PAD cause leg ulcers, slow-healing, open sores on the leg that are prone to infections of the skin and bone. If left untreated, the tissue could turn gangrenous and require lower limb amputation.

If you’re suffering from leg pain, especially if it wakes you up at night, you may be dealing with a vascular issue and need to come in to see the providers at Heart Vascular & Leg Center. Give our office a call at 661-230-9659 to schedule an appointment with one of our specialists, or book online with us today.