Smart Hydrogels: A Promising New Treatment for Diabetic Foot Ulcers

The healing of a wound is a dynamic and coordinated process involving stages of hemostasis, inflammation, proliferation, and remodeling. This process is disrupted in individuals with diabetes, leading to pain, suffering, and chronic diabetic ulcers. In recent years, polymer hydrogels with prominent hemostatic properties have garnered significant attention from researchers for their role in infection clearance and inflammation reduction in wounds. This review explores the advances in smart hydrogel innovations for improving diabetic ulcers, based on articles from reputable journals. A review study was conducted by searching for specialized keywords in various databases from ۲۰۲۰ to ۲۰۲۴. Researchers evaluated the performance of hydrogels in experiments on diabetic mouse models. The findings after ۱۵ days on diabetic mice showed that the utilized hydrogel had a positive impact of approximately ۴۱.۵% on wound closure. Hydrogels are a primary choice for wound healing due to their adjustability, biological degradability, better biological compatibility, and excellent capacity for loading antibiotic drugs. Meanwhile, for improving diabetic ulcers, drug resistance against bacteria remains one of the major challenges. Studies suggest that antibacterial metallic and non-metallic nanoparticles like silver, copper, zinc oxide, and graphene nanoparticles can be incorporated into hydrogel systems, providing broad-spectrum superb antibacterial activity without inducing drug resistance. Additionally, biopolymers with antibacterial properties can also be utilized. There exist smart hydrogels capable of regulating their chemical structure to exhibit responsive properties to stimuli, injectability, self-healing, and conductivity. Effective antibacterial hydrogels can prevent antibiotic resistance, reduce pain, and inflammation in diabetic wounds by reducing antibiotic consumption. Based on review studies, advanced hydrogels for diabetic wound treatment are highly effective and recommended, as these bio-polymer-based hydrogels offer advantages such as easy preparation, high economic benefits, and tremendous development prospects.

کلیدواژه ها:

Hydrogels ، Diabetic ، Foot Ulcers