On diabetic foot, wound healing, amputation prevention, and the merger of consumer tech with medical devices
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.
A scoping review from Kanazawa University maps 60 studies on AI-powered thermography for diabetic foot detection — and reveals a critical gap: nearly half of all studies were tested only in controlled environments, not the real world where feet actually live.
A cost-effectiveness analysis of the DIAFOS trial shows that in-shoe plantar pressure-guided custom footwear saves over €8,000 per ulcer prevented — and adherent patients push the probability of cost-effectiveness to 94%. The economic case for prevention just got stronger.
Honored to deliver the keynote at the inaugural meeting of ADFA in Paris.
Chronic wounds are biological computers stuck in a boot loop. Sharp debridement is Control-Alt-Delete — the histological reboot that converts a chronic wound back into an acute one. Only then can you run the apps.
A new systematic review finds that roughly one in three adults in remission after a healed diabetic foot ulcer develop a recurrent ulcer within 12 months — a risk comparable to several common cancers. Healing is the beginning of the next chapter, not the end of the story.
Our new paper is out today in Diabetology, and I'm really proud of this one. It's a narrative review—co-authored with Bijan Najafi and Shervanthi Homer-Vanniasinkam—that traces the entire arc of offloading from the 1930s to right now. We called it "From Plaster to Pixels" because that's genuinely what's happened. From plaster-of-Paris casts in leprosy clinics... Continue Reading →
For years, we’ve looked at chronic wounds through a relatively narrow lens—clean them, debride them, and hope the host's biology eventually kicks into gear. But as our understanding of the wound microbiome deepens, it’s becoming clear that these microbial communities aren't just "there"—they are active architects of the healing (or non-healing) environment. A recent review... Continue Reading →
We’ve known for a long time that a diabetic foot ulcer (DFU) isn’t just a wound on the bottom of a foot—it’s a massive red flare for a patient’s overall health. But a recent nationwide study in Diabetes Care just put some sobering, and ultimately hopeful, numbers behind that reality. The data from this massive... Continue Reading →
