Negative pressure wound therapy for treating foot wounds in people with diabetes mellitus

Negative pressure wound therapy may be more effective in healing post-operative foot wounds and ulcers of the foot in people with diabetes mellitus compared with moist wound dressings.

The quality of evidence is downgraded by study limitations (unclear allocation concealment and blinding), and by imprecise results (few patients and outcome events).

Summary

A Cochrane review included 5 studies with a total of 605 subjects. Pooling was not done due to limited data and clinical heterogeneity between studies. Two studies compared negative pressure wound therapy (NPWT) with standard moist wound dressings. The first of these was conducted in people with diabetes mellitus (DM) and post-amputation wounds and reported that significantly more people healed in the negative pressure wound therapy group compared with the moist dressing group (table ).

The second study, conducted in people with debrided foot ulcers, also reported a statistically significant increase in the proportion of ulcers healed in the negative pressure wound therapy group compared with the moist dressing group (table ). Findings from the remaining 3 studies provided limited data, as they were small, with limited reporting.

Clinical comments

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Ədəbiyyat

1. Dumville JC, Hinchliffe RJ, Cullum N et al. Negative pressure wound therapy for treating foot wounds in people with diabetes mellitus. Cochrane Database Syst Rev 2013;(10):CD010318.