On diabetic foot, wound healing, amputation prevention, and the merger of consumer tech with medical devices
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.
New in Diabetes Care: dropout from diabetic foot ulcer offloading trials is not random. Slower walking and depressive symptoms predict who leaves (AUC 0.81) — and a lower-burden smart boot kept people engaged. Attrition is signal, not noise.
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.
Three new papers converge on a two-cent idea: the neutrophil percentage-to-albumin ratio (NPAR) measures the balance between inflammatory injury and nutritional reserve — tracking both how bad the diabetic foot is now and how the patient fares over years. Plus a clear-eyed look at why AI-driven precision nutrition isn't here yet, and what it will take.
Windy Cole and colleagues propose a master-protocol basket trial that borrows oncology's tissue-agnostic playbook for hard-to-heal wounds — testing a single mechanism-targeted therapy across diabetic foot and venous leg ulcers under one Bayesian, sham-controlled design. We've spent a decade framing the diabetic foot like cancer; here, the trial architecture grows up to match.
