What is the diabetic foot ulcer?
What Is a Diabetic Foot Ulcer? A diabetic foot ulcer is an open sore or wound that occurs in approximately 15 percent of patients with diabetes, and is commonly located on the bottom of the foot. Of those who develop a foot ulcer, six percent will be hospitalized due to infection or other ulcer-related complications.
What can you do for a diabetic foot ulcer?
There are several key factors in the appropriate treatment of a diabetic foot ulcer:
- Prevention of infection.
- Taking the pressure off the area, called “off-loading”
- Removing dead skin and tissue, called “debridement”
- Applying medication or dressings to the ulcer.
- Managing blood glucose and other health problems.
What do diabetic foot ulcers look like?
A foot ulcer looks like a red crater in the skin. Most foot ulcers are located on the side or bottom of the foot or on the top or tip of a toe. This round crater can be surrounded by a border of thickened, callused skin.
When foot ulcers are not deep, the outlook for healing is good if circulation to the foot is adequate. With the best wound-care methods available, most ulcers heal within 12 weeks. However, about one in three healed ulcers return.
Shock Wave Therapy’s Effect on Diabetic Foot Ulcers
2021: https://www.cleveland19.com/2021/02/05/new-shock-wave-technology-healing-diabetics-feet-faster/
Takeaway: “With this therapy we note that there was a substantial increase in oxygenation in the wound tissue after only one use,” said Dr. Windy Cole, of Richmond Medical Center. The device delivers acoustic shock waves to tissue, to help jump start healing, through new blood vessel formation. “We are using these pulses, and this energy is being transferred into the tissues and what it does is these wounds that are chronic or stalled or non-healing, it allows for new tissue generation,” she said.
2019:
Robert Galiano, MD; Robert Snyder, DPM, MSc, CWS, FFPM RCPS (Glasg); Perry Mayer, MB, BCh, BAO BSci (hon); Lee C. Rogers, DPM; Oscar Alvarez, PhD, CCT, FAPWCA; The Sanuwave Trial Investigators. Focused shockwave therapy in diabetic foot ulcers: secondary endpoints of two multicentre randomised controlled trials. THIS Information was pulled from an ARTICLE that IS REPRINTED FROM THE JOURNAL OF WOUND CARE VOL 28, NO 6, JUNE 2019 https://www.premiershockwave.com/resources/63.pdf
The outcomes for the primary and secondary endpoints from these studies show that ESWT administered adjunctively with standard care is an effective advanced therapy for neuropathic DFUs (grade 1A and 2A) that do not respond to two weeks’ standard care alone by reducing wound volume by at least 50%.
