Of 4445 potentially relevant publications, 195 were screened based on the full text and 87 were included in the final analysis. Of the studies included, 62 reported epidemiology data, 29 clinical outcome data, 12 humanistic outcome data and 12 economic outcome data (Fig. 1). Studies were mostly observational and primarily performed in Asia and Europe.

PRISMA flow diagram. aOf the 87 publications identified in the review, several studies reported multiple outcomes, resulting in an overlap in the count of the number of studies per type of burden. CA congress abstract, DM diabetes mellitus, PAD peripheral artery disease, PRISMA Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses, T2D type 2 diabetes

In brief, 22 studies did not provide a definition for PAD [26, 47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63,64,65,66,67], 32 relied on ankle-brachial index (ABI) values ≤ 0.9 (alone or in combination with other parameters [16, 68,69,70,71,72,73,74,75,76,77,78,79,80,81,82,83,84,85,86,87,88,89,90,91,92,93,94,95,96,97,98]) and 31 used the International Classification of Diseases codes or combinations of clinical and/or instrumental assessment [99,100,101,102,103,104,105,106,107,108,109,110,111,112,113,114,115,116,117,118,119,120,121,122,123,124,125,126,127,128,129].

Definitions are reported in ESM Table 3.

Overall, 62 studies (63 publications) provided data on the epidemiology of PAD in people with T2D [16, 26, 47,48,49,50,51, 57, 58, 60,61,62, 64,65,66, 68,69,70,71,72,73,74,75, 77,78,79, 81,82,83,84,85,86,87, 89,90,91,92,93,94,95,96,97,98,99,100,101, 104,105,106, 108, 109, 111, 112, 114,115,116,117,118, 122, 124, 126,127,128]. The main characteristics of the included studies, mostly observational, are presented in Table