New Treatment Heals Diabetic Skin Wounds Fast

Diabetics who have had the disease 15 years, 20 years, or more, often start developing wounds in the skin, especially on their feet and shins. Diabetic skin wounds may never break the skin and never bleed. Sometimes there is just a hole underneath the skin with the top layer of skin intact. 

Sometimes diabetic skin wounds result in the skin turning black or blue, or crusting over with substance that looks like mucus. Diabetes may cause the formation of calluses that are so thick that they cause the skin to blister around them, and it can also cause open wounds that are easily infected, providing a freeway for infection to enter the muscles and bones of the feet and legs.

On lifetime basis, about 20% of all diabetics develop diabetic skin wounds, and about 5% have amputations.

What Goes Wrong in a Diabetic Skin Ulcer?

The underlying problem that causes diabetic skin ulcers is a loss of circulation in the foot. Many diabetics develop some degree of atherosclerosis in arteries all over their bodies. In some parts of the body, the circulatory can "re-route" blood flow around stretches of arteries that are blocked by calcified cholesterol plaques. Blood continues to flow where it is needed through collateral arteries. In the foot, however, there is relatively little room between the arteries and their collaterals. If an artery in the foot becomes clogged by atherosclerosis, less blood can flow through the collateral arteries, and any injury to the tissues around the artery reduces the flow of blood even more. So little blood flows to the skin at some locations that they atrophy.

Diabetic Neuropathy Complicates the Problems Caused by Poor Circulation

Making the situation worse is the reality that most long-term diabetics develop some degree of diabetic neuropathy. This is a condition of degeneration in the nerves that serve the foot. The sural and tibial nerves in the feet originate above the knees. They have to send nutrients from top to bottom along the nerve when there is less arterial flow in the feet. In diabetic neuropathy, these nerves become less and less functional the lower they go, so that there is less and less feeling in the feet.

See Also: Maggots Help Heal Diabetic Wounds

An example of just how profound sensory loss in the feet becomes is the fact that most surgery on the feet is performed without anesthetic--diabetics don't even feel it. Diabetics also may not experience pain when they step on a tack or a nail, or they break a bone, or they cut the cuticle of a toenail. If they do not inspect their feet on a daily basis, infections can set in quickly. It's not unusual for the reason a diabetic finally goes to the podiatrist is that the infection smells so bad they have to throw out their socks or even their shoes.

EpiFix For Accelerated Wound Healing

When diabetic skin wounds are detected early, they often are not difficult to treat. The doctor or podiatrist (foot specialist) removes affected tissue through a process called debridement, cutting away dead tissue so new, healthy tissue can take its place. Debridement sounds a little scary, but for most diabetics, because of nerve damage, it is usually painless. As long as there is still good circulation to the feet (the doctors usually feel for pulses in the feet), debridement and keeping the wound clean are all the treatment needed.

Not all diabetic wounds are infected. Some wounds do not require any kind of antibiotic or antibacterial treatment.

Sometimes doctors treat infection wounds with silver nitrate, or with topical antibiotics.

When the circulation is worse, debridement may not be enough. Doctors may recommend hyperbaric oxygen treatment. In this procedure, the patient is placed in a high-pressure chamber so that oxygen is essentially forced into the bloodstream. More oxygen reaches the affected tissue, and it heals faster. 

The doctor may treat the wound with hormones to stimulate the growth of the skin. If the wound is clean and non-infected, sometimes the doctor will graft skin. Only as a last resort to avoid amputating the foot, however, have most doctors used preparations of cells harvested from the amniotic membrane, the innermost lining of the placenta, donated by mothers after giving birth. The baby is not harmed by the donation of the placenta, and the placenta is "scrubbed" of any potential microbial contamination before it is used to manufacture the wound treatment. The tissue used for the preparation EpiFix (made by MiMedx in Marietta, Georgia) is only accepted from mothers who have delivered live babies by Caesarian section.

What recent research has found is using human skin cells to as a first line of treatment for the very worst diabetic skin ulcers results in about a 90% cure rate after just four weeks of use (compared to 50% cure rates with a combination of other methods).

See Also: Types of Diabetic Neuropathy

More blood flows to the wound, in just a few weeks, and the skin is able to heal faster and more completely. The tissue also contains a variety of growth factors that stimulate the growth of skin on the foot, just as they stimulated the growth of skin on the fetus.

Treatment with products such as EpiFix, if you live in the USA (similar products are also approved for use in Canada) is not cheap. You are not likely to receive them unless you have private health insurance, military coverage, or Medicare. But if you have serious diabetic foot wound from which infection has been cleared that is stubbornly refusing to heal, EpiFix may be the answer for avoiding amputation.