On diabetic foot, wound healing, amputation prevention, and the merger of consumer tech with medical devices
A new Queensland study from Son Nghiem, Pete Lazzarini, Lauren Ward and colleagues in Diabetic Medicine finds that investing in earlier access to diabetic foot services returns nearly $8 for every $1 spent โ with lower costs, fewer hospitalisations, and better quality of life.
We moved to the toe pressure precisely because digital arteries were supposed to be spared from calcification. A new JVS-Vascular Insights study from Welling, Bakker, Ferraresi and colleagues finds digital artery calcification in nearly 30% of limbs, shows it doubles one-year limb-event risk, and that it falsely elevates toe pressure โ with a simple fix: when calcium shows on the foot film, subtract 20โ30 mmHg.
Ninety percent of clinicians know about the Medicare Therapeutic Shoe Benefit and nearly all recommend shoes, yet fewer than one in five eligible patients ever gets them. A new study from Ryan Crews and Carol Kurth shows the bottleneck isn't awareness. It's friction.
Amputated tissue from the sea cucumber Psolus fabricii healed its own wounds and kept living in plain, non-sterile seawater for more than three years. Jobson et al. in Science Advances on "natural tissue immortality" โ and why a wound-healing surgeon can't look away.
David G. Armstrong, DPM, MD, PhD, of the Keck School of Medicine of USC, has concluded a 13-day, five-city academic tour of China โ delivering keynotes at the SIDC meeting in Shijiazhuang, the 14th CODHy China Congress in Shanghai, and the 6th Yat-sen Endocrine and Metabolism Forum in Guangzhou, and being conferred an Honorary Visiting Professorship at Peking University First Hospital.
The final stop of our China tour: the SUNYIXIAN (้ธไป) Forum in Guangzhou, hosted alongside Prof. Li Yan's group at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital. A talk on the global evidence for macrophage modulation in diabetic foot ulcers โ delivered, fittingly, in the city where Sun Yat-sen trained as a physician before he ever led a revolution. Medicine and revolution, born in the same place.
A lovely piece by our friend and colleague Alisha Oropallo and her team at Northwell, just out in the International Wound Journal. The question they ask is one we should be asking more loudly: before you reach for a CAMP (cellular/acellular/matrix-like product, i.e., a "skin substitute") on a chronic DFU or VLU, what is the... Continue Reading →
A new paper from Ioana Popescu and colleagues โ including Aksone Nouvong and Vincent Rowe at UCLA Geffen, with the RAND Corporation team โ just landed in JAMA Network Open. It is, to my eye, the strongest population-level evidence yet that access to podiatry is access to limb preservation. The setup: 707,971 Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries... Continue Reading →
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.
