Topical antimicrobial agents for treating foot ulcers in people with diabetes.

CONCLUSIONS: The randomised controlled trial data on the effectiveness and safety of topical antimicrobial treatments for diabetic foot ulcers is limited by the availability of relatively few, mostly small, and often poorly designed trials. Based on our systematic review and analysis of the literature, we suggest that: 1) use of an antimicrobial dressing instead of a non-antimicrobial dressing may increase the number of diabetic foot ulcers healed over a medium-term follow-up period (low-certainty evidence); and 2) there is probably little difference in the risk of adverse events related to treatment between systemic antibiotics and topical antimicrobial treatments based on the available studies (moderate-certainty evidence). For each of the other outcomes we examined there were either no reported data or the available data left us uncertain as to whether or not there were any differences between the compared treatments. Given the high, and increasing, frequency of diabetic foot wounds, we encourage investigators to undertake properly designed randomised controlled trials in this area to evaluate the effects of topical antimicrobial treatments for both the prevention and the treatment of infection in these wounds and ultimately the effects on wound healing. PMID: 28613416 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews - Category: General Medicine Authors: Tags: Cochrane Database Syst Rev Source Type: research