Vol. 6, Issue 2, Part B (2024)

Background and Objectives: The Diabetic foot is one of the most feared complications of diabetes, with prolonged duration of hospitalization, high expenses and eventuality of amputation of the limb, with high morbidity. Foot disorders are a major cause of morbidity leading to a very prolonged, expensive treatment to the patient and hence in places like India where we have very limited options for treatment of diabetic foot and most of the them lead to eventual amputation of the foot in various degrees leaving the patient in a very depressive, helpless state of disability. Hence I have decided to undertake this study to determine the various clinical aspects of diabetic foot as it has numerous ways of presentation and evaluation of various treatment protocols employed to treat diabetic foot as in a country like India where treatment options like amputation does not look very feasible due to the functional prosthesis being not available or very high priced also the prosthesis are most of the times very uncomfortable to patients.

Methods: A total of 50 subjects were enrolled in the study as per the inclusion and exclusion criteria. A written and informed consent of the patient was obtained and followed by detailed history and examination including the signs, symptoms and complications of the disease and also evaluation of outcome of various treatments was done. At the end counseling related to prevention of development or retarding the progression of the disease was done to all the patients.

Results: To summarize, the diabetic foot in my study has presented as the clinical profile as most patients being males; age at presentation between 50-60 yrs.; Most common presenting as an ulcer; most common on the dorsal aspect of the foot; Most common secondary to some trauma; most patients were already suffering from diabetes for 1-5 yrs.; Most common causative organism isolated from the culture swab was Staphylococcus Aureus; average HbA1c was less than 7 (6.7); Average stay of the patients in the hospital was 20 days; Most of the patients did not have any complications of diabetes like Osteomyelitis, peripheral neuropathy and peripheral vascular disease; for most of the patients the treatment protocol used for the management was surgical debridement followed by sterile dressings.