On diabetic foot, wound healing, amputation prevention, and the merger of consumer tech with medical devices
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 →
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Johann Georg Mönckeberg was a Hamburg patrician, born in 1877. His father — same name — was a senator of the free city, with the Mönckebergstrasse running from the Rathaus to the Hauptbahnhof named after him. The son grew up in a household where the name was already on the streets. He studied medicine at... Continue Reading →
