Clinical Study of Local Application of Insulin on Diabetic Foot Ulcer Healing

Introduction: Foot complications are a major cause of hospitalization in patients with Diabetes Mellitus (DM), which consumes a high number of hospital days because of multiple surgical procedures and prolonged length of stay. Patients with DM have up to a 25% lifetime risk of developing a foot ulcer, which precedes amputation in up to 85% of cases. A mainstay of Diabetic Foot Ulcer (DFU) therapy is debridement of all necrotic, callus, and fibrous tissue, with a primary goal to obtain wound closure. Materials and Methods: Cases with diabetic foot ulcer presenting to our OPD/IPD and signing the informed consent form before study as well as fulfilling the inclusion criteria mentioned along with detailed clinical examination of the patient as well as laboratory workup the study was an open labelled randomised control trial. Results: The study was carried out with 64 patients selected randomly and sorted into two groups, i.e. the control and test subjects. No difference was observed in two groups with respect to wound depth after debridement (p-0.85). However, the depth of wound was significantly less in insulin group at week 1, 2 and 3 as compared to control group. The percentage decrease in wound depth was more in insulin group than control group by the end of 3rd week. Primary closure was observed in 62.5% and 84.4% patients while STSG was required in 37.5% and 15.6% cases of control and insulin group respectively.