Latest
Research
New research on diabetes-related foot disease is published on an almost daily basis. Keeping track of what is out there and finding the time to read seems a near impossible job at times. DFA aims to provide summaries on latest research from around the globe and nationally to keep you up-to-date.
loading… A new position paper has been published for clinicians dealing with wounds in general. This position paper on antimicrobial stewardship in wound care is a must read for any clinician who deals with wounds on a weekly basis. Aside from diabetic foot infections, which play host to a niche array parameters that are distinctly…
Read Moreloading… A new, and instant classic, review article was published this week in one of the most important medical journals of all, the New England Journal of Medicine. In seven pages filled with their enormous experience and knowledge, David Armstrong, Andrew Boulton and Sicco Bus review the problem of diabetic foot ulcers and their recurrence.…
Read Moreloading… New unique research from Queensland has been published in the journal PLoS One, showing that four out of ten uninfected diabetic foot ulcers develop infection during the first twelve months of treatment. The researchers analyzed long-term data from >850 patients presenting with an uninfected diabetic foot ulcers from the Queensland High Risk Foot Form…
Read Moreloading… Prevention of foot ulcers is an enormous challenge, with great potential in reducing the burden of diabetic foot disease. Following three very successful trials in the US, home monitoring of foot temperature has been advocated as a method to predict and prevent foot ulcers. However, this therapy is hardly used in daily clinical practice.…
Read Moreloading… Healing an ulcer is important, but it is only the first step in the treatment. It is long known that patients whose ulcer healed are at high-risk of developing a new one, but this has never been investigated in large and well-defined cohorts. New data from Sweden confirms our fears: recurrence rates after an…
Read Moreloading… An interesting open-access article has been published on classification of infections. Professor Lipsky and colleagues describe their dissatisfaction with different classification systems that have been proposed over the past few decades for skin and soft tissue infections (SSTI). They contrast the lack of validation of any of these to the several published studies that…
Read Moreloading… The second report from the National Diabetes Foot Care Audit England and Wales has recently been published, presenting results of 2014 to 2016. This second report includes data from an impressive total of 11,073 patients who underwent expert assessment of their 13,034 ulcer episodes. The most important finding was that 40% had an interval…
Read Moreloading… A hard treatment decision in the care for people with diabetic foot disease is the decision whether to perform a minor amputation, or to continue with conservative treatment. Amputation is by many still seen as a treatment failure, which leads to overemphasis on conservative treatment. For minor amputation, however, the situation is not black-and-white,…
Read Moreloading… New Australian research has, for the first time, looked at geographical variations in amputation incidence in Australia. Using data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, researchers from La Trobe University, Federation University and the University of New South Wales looked at all amputations in Australia for the financial years 2007-8 to 2011-12. In addition…
Read Moreloading… Diabetic foot disease is a costly complication of diabetes, something that has been known for years. Various studies from all over the world have outlined these costs, each time pointing at costly care episodes for uninfected ulcers, with costs spiraling out of control when hospitalization is needed. For the first time, all these studies…
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