A new initiative from Abbott hopes to increase awareness of peripheral arterial disease (PAD) in the UK with the aim of preventing unnecessary amputations. Following the launch of the campaign, Samih Al Mawass, divisional vice president of Abbott’s vascular business for Europe, Middle East and Africa, speaks to Vascular News to discuss the origins, execution and future of the project.
Tens of thousands of amputations are carried out in Europe each year, Al Mawass shares, with the number increasing annually. He adds that diabetes is a significant cause of amputations, even though many foot amputations due to diabetes are thought to be preventable, which “comes at a huge financial, but more importantly emotional, cost”.
To highlight the scale and urgency of the issue at hand, Abbott devised AmpuNATION—a campaign centred around a series of six portraits, shot by iconic photographer Rankin, of people living with amputation. The photographs were exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London on 22 January and subsequently at the 2025 Leipzig Interventional Course (LINC; 28–30 January, Leipzig, Germany).
The portraits accompany an Abbott-funded report on the economic impact of limb-salvage, authored by Athanasios Saratzis (University of Leicester, Leicester, UK) and colleagues, that was recently published in the British Journal of Surgery.
On the origins of the campaign, Al Mawass notes that the idea was to do something different. “Abbott is not new to the field,” he says, “and we have been trying the usual ways of building awareness through the traditional channels, but unfortunately we have only seen baby-step improvements.”
It was also important for Abbott to reach a wider target audience than it had done with previous campaigns, Al Mawass continues. “In the past,” he recalls, “we were trying as much as possible to build the awareness of vascular surgeons, and we saw that this was not enough, because if it was, we would not see the number of amputations increasing.”
AmpuNATION represents “a wake-up call for all stakeholders,” Al Mawass says, from patients and physicians to healthcare systems, industry partners and societies. This multi-stakeholder approach, he explains, is necessitated by the complex, threefold nature of the problem at the campaign’s core. The issue of late referral and assessment calls for patient awareness, while a lack of standardised management for chronic limb-threatening ischaemia (CLTI) patients requires awareness among the physician community, and a lack of resources warrants the involvement of decision makers and the wider healthcare system.
Collaboration between stakeholders is also crucial, Al Mawass points out, commenting: “It is really all stakeholders that need to put their heads together”. Remarking specifically on the importance of cooperation between industry partners, he says: “Abbott can make this buzz that you are seeing now, we can build this to a certain extent, but if we don’t collaborate with all industry players that are concerned and that can help in the treatment [of PAD patients], we will not achieve the result that we aim for, which is to ensure that these patients, the moment they have symptoms, they go into the right channel to be diagnosed and given the right treatment.”
And it is the patients and their stories that are at their centre of this project, Al Mawass stresses. “What we tried to do through the campaign was to have people share their own stories,” he says. For example, one of the portraits in the campaign is of a surgeon who, Al Mawass shares, “was trying to delay facing reality as much as possible when he first got symptoms” and “unfortunately, paid the price”.
“There is no better way than for a patient to speak to another patient to tell them to go and have your diagnosis early because if not, you’re going to have what I’m having. Your life is going to change. You’re going to be in a very difficult situation that will impact not only your life but the life of everybody around you.”
Al Mawass also touches on the fact that PAD does not affect society equally. “Certainly, parts of society are more impacted than others,” he remarks, citing differences in PAD prevalence and outcomes along lines of sex, race and ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. Indeed, statistics from a 2022 Life (Basel) paper by Horváth and colleagues, highlighted on Abbott’s AmpuNATION webpage, show that women who undergo an amputation experience a faster decline in quality of life than men and black patients face a 37% higher risk of amputation than white patients.
However, Al Mawass is also keen to point out that “the problem exists all over” and that society as a whole is “still behind from an awareness perspective”.
Reactions to the initiative have so far been positive, Al Mawass says in closing, outlining plans to take the campaign to other European markets following its UK launch. While acknowledging that these are still early days, Al Mawass is hopeful that the campaign will contribute to meaningful change. “I believe that we are definitely on the right track to build the awareness that we want to achieve.”
