A recent study shows, new battery-powered electric bandages might speed up wound healing. Testing on animals revealed that wounds treated with electric bandages healed 30% quicker than those with regular bandages, scientists reported Aug. 7 in the journal Science Advances.
These bandages could change how we treat slow-healing wounds caused by diabetes and other long-term illnesses, researchers say. Such wounds increase someone’s chance of needing an amputation and dying. “We aimed to create a much cheaper technology to speed up healing for patients with long-lasting wounds,” said researcher Amay Bandodkar, who teaches electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University as an assistant professor.
“We also wanted to make the technology simple enough for people to use at home instead of something patients can get in clinics,” Bandodkar added in a university news release.
The study is part of a bigger Defense Department-funded project to quicken wound healing through different kinds of new dressings, researchers said. These electric bandages have electrodes on one side and a small battery powered by water on the other, researchers said.
The dressing is put on, so the electrodes touch the wound, and a drop of water turns on the battery. The bandage then creates an electric field that lasts for hours. “That electric field is crucial, because it’s well known that electric fields speed up healing in long-lasting wounds,” said lead researcher Rajaram Kaveti, a postdoctoral researcher at NC State.
The electrodes can bend, so they can stay in contact with deep and shaped wounds, researchers said.
“We ran tests on the wound dressings using diabetic mice, a model that researchers often use to study human wound healing,” explained lead researcher Maggie Jakus, who is working on her doctorate in biomedical engineering at Columbia University.
“Our findings showed that the device’s electrical stimulation helped wounds close faster, encouraged new blood vessels to form, and lowered inflammation. All these results suggest better overall wound healing,” Jakus said. The bandages don’t cost much to make. “The overhead costs come to about a couple of dollars for each dressing,” Bandodkar said.
“Diabetic foot ulceration poses a grave risk and can result in amputations of the lower limbs,” explained researcher Aristidis Veves, who serves as a surgery professor at Beth Israel Deaconess Center in Boston. We need to find another solution to treat diabetic foot conditions as the FDA has not approved this new treatment approach.
Veves believes the new bandage could “cause a revolution in how we handle diabetic foot ulcers.”
Reference:
Cheap, high-tech “electric bandage” speeds wound healing – drugs.com MedNewsÂ
