On diabetic foot, wound healing, amputation prevention, and the merger of consumer tech with medical devices
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.
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.
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.
Every one of us has quoted a healing rate. In clinic, in a grant, in a talk, in a conversation with a patient sitting on the exam table asking the only question that matters: will this close? Most of those quoted numbers came from the control arms of industry trials, which is a bit like... Continue Reading →
Six bite-sized clips from my conversation with Dr. Gabrielle (Gabbie) Hutcheson on the Diabetic Foot Files podcast (LIMBWatch Series) — from why the diabetic foot is a silent disease to how teams cut amputations by 60 percent.
Now published in Surgery: one clinician used conversational AI to vibe-code three interactive data platforms (local, national, and global), translating 15 years of amputation evidence into public tools in under a week at essentially no cost.
Three new papers converge on a two-cent idea: the neutrophil percentage-to-albumin ratio (NPAR) measures the balance between inflammatory injury and nutritional reserve — tracking both how bad the diabetic foot is now and how the patient fares over years. Plus a clear-eyed look at why AI-driven precision nutrition isn't here yet, and what it will take.
Windy Cole and colleagues propose a master-protocol basket trial that borrows oncology's tissue-agnostic playbook for hard-to-heal wounds — testing a single mechanism-targeted therapy across diabetic foot and venous leg ulcers under one Bayesian, sham-controlled design. We've spent a decade framing the diabetic foot like cancer; here, the trial architecture grows up to match.
The World Cup isn't the only global tournament underway. Thanks to Anica Badanjak and Anela Novak's new Croatian translation, the IWGDF Guidelines now reach patients in a native language on every inhabited continent on Earth — every single one.
