Vitamin a Compound Heals Diabetic Foot Ulcers

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A vitamin A compound commonly used to treat acne improves the healing of foot ulcers in patients with diabetes, researchers report in this month's issue of the Archives of Dermatology.

Previous studies suggesting that topical Retin-A (tretinoin) was helpful in enhancing wound healing in patients with diabetes were small and some results had been conflicting. "We wanted to know if tretinoin really helps or not," Dr. Tissa R. Hata of the Department of Medicine, University of California, San Diego, told Reuters Health.

The researchers conducted a clinical trial with 24 volunteers who had diabetic foot ulcers but who had no evidence of infection or circulation problems in the extremities. The patients were randomly assigned to 4 weeks of daily treatment with topical 0.05 percent tretinoin solution or a saline solution (the control group). Wound size was assessed every 2 weeks.

The 22 patients who completed the study had a total of 24 foot ulcers. Two of the 11 ulcers in the control group (18 percent) and 6 of the 13 ulcers in the treated group (46 percent) healed completely at the end of 16 weeks. There were no statistically significant adverse events, although some patients experienced mild pain at the ulcer site.

"We are very pleased with the results. We were a bit concerned because tretinoin is very irritating and we thought that the patients would become so irritated that we wouldn't be able to continue the study. But actually, that didn't seem to be a problem in most cases," Hata said. "The patients seemed to get used to it."

"We are hoping that diabetic foot clinics will adopt some of this, and use (Retin-A) when some of the other therapies that they are using don't work," she concluded.

SOURCE: Archives of Dermatology, November 2005.