Acute and Chronic Soft Tissue Wounds

Soft tissue wounds include burn wounds, diabetic foot ulcers, venous leg ulcers, and pressure ulcers, and they often show signs of delayed healing. Recently, the overall occurrence of soft tissue wounds has increased due to various conditions such as trauma, disease, and old age. Soft tissue wounds cause great discomfort to patients and impair their quality of life. Conventional wound therapy involves controlling the underlying causes such as infection, diabetes, ischemia (reduced blood flow). Conventional wound therapy is adjusting nutrition, removing tissue, moistening dressings to maintain a clean, moist bed of healing tissue, compression, and treatment to resolve infection. These therapies have shown inconsistent results. Alternative noninvasive treatments to improve and accelerate the healing of soft tissue wounds are vital.  During the study it showed that using extracorporeal shock wave therapy on soft tissue wounds proved an increase in the proliferation (growth of new cells), Angiogenesis (new growth of blood vessels) and decreased in wound pain was observed. The results of the study showed that using shockwave therapy with conventional wound therapy accelerated the wound healing process compared with just wound therapy itself. Extracorporeal shockwave therapy improved the change in wound area by 30.45%, reduced the healing time by 3 days for acute wounds and 19 days for chronic wounds and reduced the risk of wound infection by 53% when compared to conventional would therapy alone.  

Zhang L, et al, (2018) 15(4):590-599, International Wound Journal,  Efficacy and safety of extracorporeal shock wave therapy for acute and chronic soft tissue wounds: A systematic review and meta-analysis 

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7949564/pdf/lwj-15-590.pdf