On diabetic foot, wound healing, amputation prevention, and the merger of consumer tech with medical devices
Notes from Shijiazhuang: two SIDC talks with China Resources Double-Crane on the Team Approach to Limb Preservation and a hands-on WIfI classification consultation with Prof. Lianrui Guo. The classification works. The team works. The language is portable.
CODHy China in Shanghai: the first-ever Diabetic Foot and Limb Preservation session in the 14-year history of the meeting. Co-chairing alongside my mentor Prof. Andrew Boulton on one side and my mentee Prof. Wuquan Deng of Chongqing on the other. The lineage works. The language is portable. The team approach travels.
Ceremony at Beijing's historic teaching hospital marks new chapter in transpacific collaboration on diabetic foot disease and limb preservation.
Forty years of the Malvern Diabetic Foot Meeting. Thirty years of mine. One last bow from Andrew Boulton in the chair. A look back at the long arc — from a Benedictine priory in 1085 to Joslin in 1928 to DFCon in 2000 to ALPS in 2020 — and a look forward to DFCon 26, DFUpdate, traveling fellowships, and the next generation already climbing the hill.
Yu and colleagues from Ken Muneoka's group show that sequential FGF2 then BMP2 treatment flips an adult mouse digit amputation from fibrosis to regeneration — rebuilding the distal phalanx with a growth plate, plus a parallel response that regenerates a synovial joint complex with tendon, ligament, and a sesamoid-like bone. The regeneration-competent cells are already in our wound beds. We just have to learn what to say to them.
Our colleagues at the NIDDK Diabetic Foot Consortium have published the methodologic scaffolding the field has needed: a platform study—master-protocol trial design borrowed from oncology and COVID-19 vaccines—applied for the first time to DFU biomarker validation. Their mantra: No DFU Goes Unstudied.
A new systematic review and meta-analysis from Lavery, Wukich, Peters and team asks whether pre-biopsy antibiotics actually reduce bacterial culture yield in suspected diabetic foot osteomyelitis. Spoiler: maybe not.
At today's Malvern Diabetic Foot Conference, Georgetown psychiatrist Dan Powell, MD made the case for embedding behavioral health into wound healing and limb preservation programs — with Hopkins data showing a 3-day median reduction in length of stay when psychiatric consultation is proactive rather than reactive.
Field notes from Malvern, year 40. With thanks to @FranGame for the slide that should hang in every multidisciplinary clinic in the world. I came in this morning expecting another graceful walk through the National Diabetes Foot Care Audit dashboard. What I got instead was the most useful reframe I have heard in a long... Continue Reading →
A new Frontiers in Science Lead Article from Granados, Khanna, Fischer, and colleagues at King's College London — with Prokar Dasgupta as senior author — takes a swing at one of the harder questions in modern surgery. When the operating room becomes a sensorized, situationally aware ecosystem with embodied AI agents, robotic scrub assistants, and... Continue Reading →
