On diabetic foot, wound healing, amputation prevention, and the merger of consumer tech with medical devices
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.
Two diabetic foot data engines published the same day on two continents. STEADY (US) is a 5,000-patient, AI-enabled real-world registry; DARE-DiaFoot (Italy) is a deep, multi-instrumental phenotyping protocol that quietly studies remission. One is the census, the other the core sample. Together with EURODIALE, the U.S. Wound Registry, and the National Diabetes Foot Care Audit, they sketch a blueprint for finally measuring what we manage.
A new paper in BMC Health Services Research describes how we co-created a Foot Selfie app with, not for, people living with diabetes, caregivers, and clinicians in urban Lima and semi-rural Piura, Peru. Here is how the end-users redesigned remote diabetic foot surveillance to fit the rooms where it actually happens.
A new 5,698-patient real-world cohort from Valladolid (Del Río-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.
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.
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.
