Social Vulnerability Is Associated With Higher Rates of Hospitalizations and Amputations for Peripheral Arterial Disease

[...]structural barriers may limit early diagnosis and treatment in these patient groups.3 These barriers include lack of access to vascular specialists because of rurality and transportation difficulties.3 Third, provider-related conscious or unconscious bias may lead to disparate care in this patient group.4 Our study has several important limitations. [...]our study cannot determine if medical, endovascular, or surgical treatments were attempted before amputation because of limitations of the dataset. [...]because this is an observational study, there is a risk of unmeasured confounding.