On diabetic foot, wound healing, amputation prevention, and the merger of consumer tech with medical devices
Margin-directed antibiotic therapy after surgery for diabetic foot osteomyelitis is appealing, but surgical assessment, histopathology, and microbiology often provide different answers. A new Clinical Infectious Diseases Viewpoint explains why multidisciplinary interpretation and prospective standardization are essential.
A new Diabetes Care registry study shows that Charcot neuro-osteoarthropathy is far more than a local foot disorder. Following diagnosis, nearly nine in ten patients required emergency hospitalization, almost one-third underwent amputation, and only 44% were alive and amputation-free at five years.
Large language models can describe the world. Embodied AI must act in it. The likely progression—from factories, to hospitals, to homes—is a rising test of repeatability, accountability, and trust.
In a new Nature Materials study, traction-force-activated payloads capture the body's own growth factors and release them when repairing cells pull on the scaffold. The work spans living bone and skin models and ex vivo human skin - a striking preclinical step, not yet a treatment for diabetic foot ulcers.
One of the persistent paradoxes in diabetic foot prevention is simple: Diabetes Care, Volume 49, Issue 8. The world’s best protective shoe does no good while sitting beside the door. Now, an important multicenter randomized controlled trial from our longtime Dutch friends and colleagues—led by Lisa Vossen with Jaap van Netten, Sicco Bus, and their... Continue Reading →
A new formative study of an in-home full-color imaging scale offers a glimpse of the Foot Selfie’s next chapter—from early home plantar photography and smartphones to AI, co-creation, and ambient monitoring.
A new 28-item core descriptor set gives diabetes-related foot-ulcer studies a common baseline language—so treatments can be compared more fairly and evidence can travel farther.
Originally published in APMA News, May/June 2026, pages 16–23. The May/June 2026 issue of APMA News devotes eight pages to a two-part feature: a profile of David G. Armstrong, DPM, MD, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Surgery and Neurological Surgery at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, followed by a companion interview with Alexandria Armstrong,... Continue Reading →
The flight was cancelled. The train was cancelled. The keynote was not. How a scrapped DCA–JFK trip turned into a keynote delivered to ten Indian cities from the passenger seat of a car on the New Jersey Turnpike.
In 1,052 patients with diabetic foot ulcers, ten inflammation- and nutrition-derived ratios from routine labs tracked with amputation — and a machine-learning model combining them reached an AUC of 0.894. A cheap blood draw may help forecast which limbs are at risk.
