On diabetic foot, wound healing, amputation prevention, and the merger of consumer tech with medical devices
Notes from the Beaumont Multidisciplinary Diabetic Foot Symposium in Dublin (18 June 2026) — a true toe-and-flow gathering across vascular surgery, podiatry, endocrinology and infectious diseases, where the watchword was remission, not cure.
A new multi-omics preprint uses Mendelian randomization to argue that six circulating miRNAs causally regulate peripheral artery disease in the diabetic foot—and flags metformin as the most translationally tractable repurposing candidate. A nice piece of computational scaffolding, with the usual in-silico caveats.
Four years of data from MLK Community Healthcare show what happens when you build diabetic foot care around the patient — in exactly the place the map says amputations should be worst.
A new 5,698-patient real-world cohort from Valladolid (Del RÃo-Solá et al., Adv Wound Care 2026) reports 61.8% five-year survival overall, falling to 32.1% after major amputation — and concludes the diabetic foot ulcer should be treated as a marker of advanced systemic disease, not an isolated wound. The newest entry in a fifteen-year line of evidence putting DFU mortality squarely in the cancer conversation.
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 — 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 — with a simple fix: when calcium shows on the foot film, subtract 20–30 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" — and why a wound-healing surgeon can't look away.
Colleagues at Peking University First Hospital, SIDC, CODHy China, and the Yat-sen Endocrine and Metabolism Forum convened around a shared, reproducible language of limb risk — the WIfI classification, the Toe-and-Flow model of integrated podiatric and vascular care, and the first dedicated Diabetic Foot and Limb Preservation session in CODHy China’s 14-year history.
The final stop of our China tour: the SUNYIXIAN (逸仙) 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 — 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.
