Information
Dr. Lucas Ferrer Cardona, MD, is a board-certified vascular surgeon specializing in the minimally invasive treatment of arterial and venous disease. He brings expertise in peripheral artery disease, dialysis access, and venous disease — including varicose veins, pelvic congestion syndrome, and central venous disease — to patients in Central Texas and the Hill Country.
He earned his medical degree from the University of Puerto Rico Medical Sciences Campus in San Juan and completed his internship and residency in surgery at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia, followed by fellowship training in vascular surgery at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Dr. Ferrer Cardona has practiced with the Institute for Cardiovascular Health, a clinical partnership between Ascension Seton and UT Health Austin, and has served as an assistant professor at Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin, where his published research and clinical trial work focus on limb salvage and preventing diabetic foot amputations.
Recognized as an Austin Monthly Top Doctor, Dr. Ferrer Cardona is bilingual in English and Spanish and co-hosts Life of Flow, a weekly podcast on vascular surgery and the lives of surgeons. He is known for explaining conditions clearly and for his down-to-earth, approachable manner with patients in the ambulatory surgery setting.
Services Provided
Dialysis Access Maintenance
Angioplasty, stenting, and declotting
Vein Ablation
Treatment for varicose veins
Peripheral Artery Disease Treatment
Angioplasty and stenting
Central Venous Disease Treatment
Angioplasty and stenting
IVC Filter Placement
Inferior vena cava filter placement
Dialysis Access Surgery
AV fistula creation
Pelvic Congestion Syndrome Treatment
Vein embolization
FAQs
Peripheral artery disease, or PAD, is a narrowing of the arteries that carry blood to your legs and feet. It develops slowly, usually from the same plaque buildup that narrows the arteries around the heart, and in the early stages many people have no symptoms at all.
The most common first sign is a cramping or aching in the calf, thigh, or buttock that comes on when you walk and eases within a few minutes of stopping. Other signs include a foot that feels cold compared to the other one, leg hair that stops growing, toenails that thicken and slow down, or a sore on the foot or toe that will not heal.
Risk goes up with diabetes, smoking, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, kidney disease, and age. If you have any of those and you notice leg pain when walking or a wound that is not closing, ask your doctor about a simple in-office test called an ankle-brachial index — it compares blood pressure at your ankle to blood pressure at your arm and takes only a few minutes.
Yes. Patients are sometimes told that nothing more can be done for the circulation in a leg — often called “no-option” disease — when in fact newer techniques can still restore blood flow.
Limb salvage is the core of Dr. Ferrer Cardona’s research and clinical trial work, including preventing amputations in patients with diabetes. Techniques for reopening very small arteries below the knee and in the foot have advanced considerably, and some patients who were told amputation was the only path turn out to have options.
A second opinion does not commit you to anything. If you are facing a decision about amputation, it is reasonable to ask for a vascular surgery evaluation first.
Often they are more than cosmetic. Varicose veins form when the one-way valves inside leg veins stop closing properly, so blood pools instead of returning to the heart. That pooling is what produces the visible bulging veins — and it is also what produces the symptoms.
Aching, heaviness, throbbing, night cramps, swelling around the ankle, itching, and skin that darkens or hardens near the ankle are all signs that the vein is causing a circulation problem, not only a visible one. Left alone for long enough, the skin changes can progress to an open ulcer that is slow to heal.
Treatment today is generally an outpatient procedure. Vein ablation closes the failing vein from the inside so blood reroutes through healthy veins, and it is done through a small puncture rather than a surgical incision.
A dialysis access — usually an AV fistula created by joining an artery to a vein in the arm — carries far more blood flow than the vein was built for. Over time that stress can cause the vein to narrow, and a narrowed access clots.
Signs that an access is struggling include longer dialysis sessions, difficulty with needle placement, a change in the thrill or bruit your dialysis team listens for, more bleeding than usual after needles come out, or arm swelling.
Most of these problems can be corrected before the access fails. Angioplasty opens the narrowed segment, a stent holds it open where the narrowing keeps returning, and declotting can often rescue an access that has already clotted — usually as a same-day outpatient procedure. Keeping an existing access working is generally preferable to placing a new one.
Sometimes, yes. Pelvic congestion syndrome is caused by veins in the pelvis that have lost valve function, so blood pools in them much the way it does in varicose veins in the leg. It is an under-recognized cause of chronic pelvic pain, most often in women who have had children.
The pattern is fairly distinctive: a dull ache or heaviness low in the pelvis that gets worse over the course of the day, worse with prolonged standing, and often better when lying down. Some patients also notice varicose veins around the vulva, buttock, or upper thigh.
It is diagnosed with imaging and treated with vein embolization, a minimally invasive procedure that closes off the affected veins through a small catheter. If you have had pelvic pain for months without a clear explanation, it is worth asking whether a vein cause has been ruled out.