Understand the Diabetic Foot
A review article by
This diabetes-related ischemia and neuropathy ultimately result in a severe complication named diabetic foot (DF). All over the world, most diabetes-related hospital admissions happen due to DF. Every year more than one million DF patients suffer a lower limb amputation. Diabetic neuropathy can make patients lose the feeling in their feet. They become unable to feel a pebble inside the shocks or a blister remains unnoticed. Diabetic ischemia reduces the blood flow in the legs which makes the healing process of a sore/blister/cut difficult. In most cases, patients remain unaware of this diabetes complication and they ignore numbness, sore, deep wounds at the feet. Thus easily the disease moves to life-threatening advanced stages and the treatment is also too costly at these stages. For diabetic patients, this problem leads to leg amputation mostly because of: · Late presentation · Delayed diagnosis · Failure to recognize and treat ischemia. A well-designed and informative infographic can play a very important role to educate patients regarding their health.