Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
Researchers at the University of Manchester are developing a shocking new solution to an age old problem: A medical method that can improve wound healing by electrifying a patient’s skin.
Dr. Ardeshir Bayat and his colleagues recruited 40 volunteers and gave each of them a harmless, half-centimeter cut on their upper arm. Those study participants were then divided randomly into two groups – one group that was left to heal normally, and another which was treated with electrical pulses over a two-week period.
The researchers found that those pulses stimulated angiogenesis—or the process of forming new blood vessels, increasing blood flow to the wounded area. As a result, individuals receiving this type of treatment saw their wounds heal significantly faster than the control group. The authors published their findings in a recent edition of the journal PLOS One.
Devices to speed up healing
Slow-healing skin wounds can be a huge pain for people all over the world, the researchers explained. In the UK alone, the NHS spends more than £1 billion, or $1.5 billion, on chronic wound care. Chronic wounds, they noted, are wounds that remain open and fail to heal for at least six weeks.
Dr. Bayat’s team, in collaboration with Oxford BioElectronics Ltd., hope that these injuries can be treated using new devices that take advantage of electrical stimulation, based on the findings of their study. The university and the company teamed up on a five-year project to develop and evaluate dressings that can generate nerve impulses to the site of the damaged skin.
“This research has shown the effectiveness of electrical stimulation in wound healing, and therefore we believe this technology has the potential to be applied to any situation where faster wound healing is particularly desirable, such as following human or veterinary surgical wounds, accidental, or military trauma and in sports injuries,” Dr. Bayat said in a statement.
“This is an exciting partnership, working on a pioneering project with the potential to change substantially the way cutaneous wounds are managed in the future,” he added. “When used in acute and chronic wounds, bandages are essentially just a covering. With this technology we hope that the dressings will be able to make a significant functional contribution to healing the wounds and getting the patient back to full health as quickly as possible.”
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