On diabetic foot, wound healing, amputation prevention, and the merger of consumer tech with medical devices
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.
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.
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.
Over dinner at EWMA-DEWU in Bremen with longtime collaborator and renowned biomechanist Prof. Sicco Bus, talk drifted from classification to language — and to why English insists on two words for the same hole in the body. A slow look at what wound vs. ulcer is silently encoding every time we write it down.
A new review asks whether we can move from patching to regrowing — and what stands between lab-bench organoids and the clinic.
Senneville and Lipsky return with a measured rejoinder in Clinical Infectious Diseases (April 2026), arguing that the Lagrand trial shows the absence of evidence of superiority — not definitive equivalence — between ulcer-bed and bone biopsy for guiding antibiotic therapy in diabetic foot osteomyelitis.
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.
A new protocol paper in Sensors describes a chatbot that doses walking like a drug for patients in diabetic foot remission.
A novel inflammation-nutrition biomarker — the neutrophil percentage-to-albumin ratio (NPAR) — shows strong association with diabetic foot ulcer risk in a 1,002-patient study from Xi'an, China, reinforcing that what patients eat and how they inflame are inseparable in the diabetic foot.
