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.
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.
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.
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 →
A long-time friend's offhand observation in Bremen — that small artery disease is easy to see on an angiogram because it doesn't look like nature — leads to Mandelbrot, Murray's law, and a quantifiable complexity index for the diabetic foot.
Our new paper in Burns and Trauma presents the most comprehensive review yet of spooky action at a distance therapies for diabetic limb preservation — from spinal cord stimulation and splenic ultrasound to remote ischemic conditioning and tibial transport. Five modalities, three mechanistic pathways, one shared destination: tissue repair at a distance.
When we talk about Chronic Limb-Threatening Ischemia (CLTI), we often focus on what we can see on an angiogram. But what is actually happening inside those vessels at a microscopic level? A comprehensive histopathological analysis of amputated limbs is shedding new light on the specific patterns of arterial obstruction that lead to limb loss. This... Continue Reading →
Understanding the Vascular Dynamics of DFU Healing and Pathology A recent study published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine by Christensen et al. (2025) utilized Oxygen-15 Labeled Water PET imaging to investigate resting skeletal muscle perfusion in patients with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) and diabetic foot ulcers (DFUs), comparing them to healthy controls. This... Continue Reading →
Published today in Circulation: Cardiovascular Interventions, the LEGenD-1 trial represents a step toward a potential milestone in regenerative medicine and limb preservation. The study, titled “Anatomically Directed Lower Extremity Gene Therapy for Ulcer Healing: A Double-Blind, Randomized, Placebo-Controlled Study,” demonstrates that gene therapy can safely potentially accelerate wound healing in patients with chronic limb-threatening ischemia... Continue Reading →
Peripheral artery disease (PAD) is one of the most devastating complications of diabetes—contributing to ischemic pain, functional decline, and, in severe cases, amputation. Despite its prevalence, early detection remains elusive, and clinicians continue to search for simple, reliable markers of risk. A new multicohort study led by Wang and colleagues now shines a spotlight on... Continue Reading →
