Occasional leg pain is common. Overexertion from sports or job tasks can leave you feeling sore or tired. Ongoing leg pain may be another matter.
Your legs may be subject to blood flow conditions that cause symptoms on their own. Varicose veins can start to show through the skin of your legs with angry-looking, dark, gnarled traces that may even press out from your skin.
Leg pain from vascular sources is a treatable problem, and the team at MD Vein & Skin Specialists, led by Dr. Clement Banda, can help. In a quick visit to our offices in Columbia, Maryland, we can diagnose your condition and suggest a treatment plan to ease your discomfort and eliminate unsightly veins.
How can you tell if your leg pain may be due to varicose veins? We’ve prepared this month’s blog to help you recognize this problem.
While you know that your heart pumps blood to your body, it has little effect on the return of blood back to the heart itself. There’s simply not enough pressure created by each heartbeat to circulate blood back.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in your legs, where blood must also move against the force of gravity when you’re upright. Your veins, the vessels responsible for the return of blood, have tiny valves along their length to prevent the backwards flow of blood.
As vein tissue ages, these valves can begin to fail. When this occurs, blood can slip backward, leaking through defective valves and pooling in the legs.
This process increases the pressure on vein walls, causing additional valve failure, and when veins are near the surface of your skin, varicose veins start to show through.
While varicose veins are often a cosmetic problem with few other symptoms, that’s not always the case. Sluggish blood flow through your veins can cause pain, often described as a dull ache.
Recognizing varicose vein pain
Venous pain usually presents as a feeling of heaviness in your legs that becomes uncomfortable. Your legs can ache, throb, or feel outright sore.
Varicose veins can cause leg pain, but other conditions can cause similar pain. Though it may seem like an obvious connection when you already see varicose veins in your legs, a visit with Dr. Banda can rule out other conditions, including:
As well as pain, you could have other symptoms like:
Varicose veins aren’t always a harmless cosmetic problem. Contact MD Vein & Skin Specialists by phone or online to request an appointment today.
