On diabetic foot, wound healing, amputation prevention, and the merger of consumer tech with medical devices
A major Western Pacific review led by Byron Perrin and Peter Lazzarini maps the world’s largest regional diabetes-related foot disease burden—and eight practical ways countries can strengthen care.
A Stanford team has taught an algorithm to translate Doppler sounds into clinically meaningful ankle-brachial index ranges—potentially bringing vascular assessment closer to the point of care.
A new systematic review and meta-analysis supports functional moisturizers—particularly urea-containing formulations—for diabetic foot xerosis on intact skin.
A new Diabetes Care registry study shows that Charcot neuro-osteoarthropathy is far more than a local foot disorder. Following diagnosis, nearly nine in ten patients required emergency hospitalization, almost one-third underwent amputation, and only 44% were alive and amputation-free at five years.
In a new Nature Materials study, traction-force-activated payloads capture the body's own growth factors and release them when repairing cells pull on the scaffold. The work spans living bone and skin models and ex vivo human skin - a striking preclinical step, not yet a treatment for diabetic foot ulcers.
A new formative study of an in-home full-color imaging scale offers a glimpse of the Foot Selfie’s next chapter—from early home plantar photography and smartphones to AI, co-creation, and ambient monitoring.
A new 28-item core descriptor set gives diabetes-related foot-ulcer studies a common baseline language—so treatments can be compared more fairly and evidence can travel farther.
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 →
Six bite-sized clips from my conversation with Dr. Gabrielle (Gabbie) Hutcheson on the Diabetic Foot Files podcast (LIMBWatch Series) — from why the diabetic foot is a silent disease to how teams cut amputations by 60 percent.
