Kohn CG, et al. - In this retrospective analysis of patients hospitalized with peripheral artery disease (PAD) in 2014, researchers focused on the prevalence, demographics, clinical outcomes and economic burden of hospitalizations for these subjects. They used the National Inpatient Sample and identified 286,160 hospitalizations for PAD. The estimated rate of hospitalizations for PAD was 89.5/100,000, with 137,050 (or 45%) of these suffering Fontaine class III-IV disease. As for consequences of hospitalizations such as a major adverse limb event, major or minor lower extremity amputation or in-hospital mortality, the estimated proportion was 45.8%, 8.9%, 8.2% and 3.1%, respectively. The estimated median hospital length-of-stay was 5 (3, 9) days and costs were $15,755 ($8972, $27,800), leading to ∼$6.31 billion as the annual cost burden for hospitalization. Overall, patients and the US healthcare system are substantially burdened, both medically and financially, by PAD hospitalizations.