OBJECTIVE intermittent claudication is associated with a significant reduction in quality of life. Treatment of claudicants aims to reduce mortality from cardio- and cerebro-vascular events and to improve quality of life. Quality of life assessment should be used to guide and evaluate treatment in this group of patients. Peripheral percutaneous transluminal angioplasty (PTA) is now widely used in the treatment of intermittent claudication. The aim of this review is to examine the effect of PTA on quality of life (QOL) in patients with intermittent claudication. METHODS a review was conducted of prospective clinical trials assessing the effect of peripheral PTA on QOL. Publications were retrieved by searching Medline and PreMedline, EMBASE, the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, the Cochrane Database of systematic reviews, AMED and CINAHL. The reference lists of the relevant publications were also searched. RESULTS seven prospective studies (10 publications) on the effect of PTA on QOL in claudicants were identified. Several different questionnaires were used to measure quality of life (Nottingham Health Profiile, SF-36, EuroQol) none of which were disease specific. All the studies showed some improvement in QOL after PTA at follow-up periods of between 6 weeks and 24 months, except for one which showed some improvement at 6 months but not at 24 months. CONCLUSIONS despite the fact that studies on the effect of PTA on QOL in claudicants have used generic QOL questionnaires which are relatively insensitive, the findings suggest that PTA may result in some improvement in QOL in these patients, although level I evidence to support this is lacking. The availability of disease-specific questionnaires should enable a more accurate assessment of PTA on QOL in these patients.