On diabetic foot, wound healing, amputation prevention, and the merger of consumer tech with medical devices
A new review asks whether we can move from patching to regrowing — and what stands between lab-bench organoids and the clinic.
Senneville and Lipsky return with a measured rejoinder in Clinical Infectious Diseases (April 2026), arguing that the Lagrand trial shows the absence of evidence of superiority — not definitive equivalence — between ulcer-bed and bone biopsy for guiding antibiotic therapy in diabetic foot osteomyelitis.
Our new paper in Burns and Trauma presents the most comprehensive review yet of spooky action at a distance therapies for diabetic limb preservation — from spinal cord stimulation and splenic ultrasound to remote ischemic conditioning and tibial transport. Five modalities, three mechanistic pathways, one shared destination: tissue repair at a distance.
A new protocol paper in Sensors describes a chatbot that doses walking like a drug for patients in diabetic foot remission.
A novel inflammation-nutrition biomarker — the neutrophil percentage-to-albumin ratio (NPAR) — shows strong association with diabetic foot ulcer risk in a 1,002-patient study from Xi'an, China, reinforcing that what patients eat and how they inflame are inseparable in the diabetic foot.
A Stanford team demonstrates that a smartphone app measuring vibration perception thresholds can detect large-fiber sensory deficits in patients with diabetes — a potential advance for accessible, patient-operated neuropathy screening.
A scoping review from Kanazawa University maps 60 studies on AI-powered thermography for diabetic foot detection — and reveals a critical gap: nearly half of all studies were tested only in controlled environments, not the real world where feet actually live.
A cost-effectiveness analysis of the DIAFOS trial shows that in-shoe plantar pressure-guided custom footwear saves over €8,000 per ulcer prevented — and adherent patients push the probability of cost-effectiveness to 94%. The economic case for prevention just got stronger.
A new single-center study from the Netherlands quantifies the devastating outcomes of the diabetic foot attack: only 48.5% wound closure, 46% major amputation by 12 months, 26% one-year mortality, and 12-month amputation-free survival of just 39.7%. Time is tissue.
A new bibliometric analysis from Wei and colleagues at Capital Medical University in Beijing maps 25 years (2000–2024) of global research on plantar pressure and diabetic foot ulcers — over 2,100 publications indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection. The findings tell a story that will feel familiar to many of us who have... Continue Reading →
