A Foot Ulcer Is a Whole-Body Diagnosis: New 5698 Patient Cohort Puts DFU Survival Back in the Cancer Conversation — But There’s Hope #DiabeticFoot #ActAgainstAmputation #ToeandFlow

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.

$8 Back for Every $1: Earlier Access to #DiabeticFoot Care Is a Bargain #ActAgainstAmputation #CostEffectiveness @alpslimb

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.

We Moved to the Toe to Escape Calcification — and It Followed Us There: Digital Artery Calcification, Falsely-High Toe Pressures, and a 20–30 mmHg Temporary Fix #DiabeticFoot #PAD #CLTI #ToePressure #Calcification #LimbPreservation #ActAgainstAmputation @alpslimb

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.

Hiding in Plain Sight: The #MedicareShoeBill Is Our Most Underused Lifesaver #ActAgainstAmputation @alpslimb

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.

Malvern at 40, and 30 Years On: One Last Bow for Profs. Boulton and Rayman, and a Long Road Ahead #Malvern40 #ActAgainstAmputation #DFCon #LimbPreservation @ALPSLimb

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.

“No DFU Goes Unstudied”: The Diabetic Foot Consortium #DFC Biomarker Platform Study from Brings Master-Protocol Design to Wound Healing #DFU #DiabeticFoot

Our colleagues at the NIDDK Diabetic Foot Consortium have published the methodologic scaffolding the field has needed: a platform study—master-protocol trial design borrowed from oncology and COVID-19 vaccines—applied for the first time to DFU biomarker validation. Their mantra: No DFU Goes Unstudied.

Hold the Antibiotics Before Bone Biopsy—Or Not? A Provocative New Meta-Analysis from #Lavery, #Wukich, #Peters and Team #DFO #Osteomyelitis #DiabeticFoot

A new systematic review and meta-analysis from Lavery, Wukich, Peters and team asks whether pre-biopsy antibiotics actually reduce bacterial culture yield in suspected diabetic foot osteomyelitis. Spoiler: maybe not.

Mönckeberg: How a Quiet 1903 Autopsy Became the Loudest Plain Film in Limb Preservation #DiabeticFoot #PAD #CLTI #LimbPreservation #ActAgainstAmputation #PMAC #Calcification

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 →

If It Doesn’t Look Like a Tree: #Fractals, #Microcirculation, and Why Small Artery Disease Is So Easy to See

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.

On the Whole Etymology of the Hole in Skin: Wound, Ulcer & a Dinner in Bremen with Sicco Bus #DiabeticFoot #Etymology #LimbPreservation

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.

Up ↑

Verified by MonsterInsights