Washington: Scientists have claimed that oxygen treatment can help diabetics heal foot wounds and avoid lower limb amputation.
Every 30 seconds a person somewhere in the world loses a lower limb to amputation due to diabetic foot disease. Now, an international team has found in their study that oxygen can heal the debilitating wounds that plague people with diabetes.
In their study, the scientists have modelled the use of hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT), which is the intermittent exposure of the body to pure oxygen under pressure, to heal the chronic wounds that lead to the need for amputation.
Jennifer Flegg of Queensland University of Technology, who led the team, said a small cut on the foot of a diabetic could have catastrophic effects because their wounds did not heal the same way as normal wounds.
"The investigation showed that HBOT applied intermittently under pressure to a diabetic wound speeds up its healing. Our modelling showed firstly that only HBOT, and not oxygen applied with no extra pressure, stimulates healing of these chronic wounds. "We also found that HBOT must be continued until the wound has completely healed in order for it to be effective. However, we found that individual wounds need to be treated differently.
"Each patient has different healing capacities with HBOT and so our modelling shows that there should be a research focus on individual treatment protocols in order to optimise the outcome for each patient," Flegg said. The findings are to be published in an upcoming issue of the 'Public Library of Science (PLoS): Computational Biology' journal.
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