Your skin is the body’s largest organ and outer form of protection against infection, injury, and disease. This multilayered protective barrier performs many duties, but when it’s damaged through cuts, lacerations, and scrapes, its healing process helps to keep infection from getting in. Unfortunately, that’s also when it’s vulnerable, and other medical problems can make that process harder.
Diabetes does a lot of damage throughout the body, especially when left untreated, and one of the problems it creates is slowing down healing from wounds. This is a big problem with diabetic foot ulcers, and proper management of this complication of diabetes requires understanding the healing time and how to cope with issues that can arise during it.
Tarzana and Inglewood, California, residents looking for help with foot-related complications from diabetes can find help with Drs. Ashkan Soleymani, Michael Salih, Arash Jalil, Sama Tabari, and their staff at the Cedars Foot & Ankle Center.
Diabetes harms the body through the overabundance of blood glucose, or blood sugar. This reduces the effectiveness of hormones like insulin, and left untreated, damages nearly every part of the body.
Diabetic foot ulcers are a common complication of untreated diabetes, and they form when the skin tissue starts to break down in different parts of your feet. We identify the extent of the damage these ulcers do with the Wagner Ulcer Classification System, on a scale of zero to five:
The prevalence of ulcers in diabetic foot patients makes it necessary to classify the ulcer’s severity.
The risk of latter-stage complications in foot ulcers is higher when undiagnosed, because of how diabetes affects your ability to heal. This problem occurs because:
High blood sugar (hyperglycemia) causes blood vessels to narrow and harden, limiting the amount of necessary nutrients and oxygen that can reach areas like your feet.
Blood sugar issues also affect your nerves, reducing sensation and making damage in parts of your body harder for you to detect.
This complication increases the risk of infection in diabetic ulcers because your immune system is crucial to how you heal from wounds. Bacterial infections also thrive in high blood glucose areas, leading to issues like gangrene.
The oxidative stress from diabetes also causes high levels of inflammation in the tissue, making the healing process slow.
The standard process of healing from wounds completely in healthy tissue can take as little as three months, depending on the extent of the damage. The four primary stages of healing are hemostasis, when blood vessels constrict to reduce blood loss, inflammation, when the body sends white blood cells to the injury, proliferation, where new tissue grows, and remodeling, where the new tissue strengthens.
There isn’t an exact timeframe for how long diabetic foot ulcers take to heal because much depends on the stage you’re at and how much work needs to be done to make healing easier. Overall, it can take months or even years to completely heal when dealing with diabetic foot ulcers.
Recovering from foot ulcers is possible, but it will take less time if they are less severe, so you should get them checked out the moment you notice symptoms. Make an appointment with Drs. Soleymani, Salih, Jalil, Tabari, and the Cedars Foot & Ankle Center team today to treat foot ulcers or other related conditions.
