Research Article Generating and Reversing Chronic Wounds in Diabetic Mice by Manipulating Wound Redox Parameters

Copyright © 2014 Sandeep Dhall et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. By 2025, more than 500M people worldwide will suffer from diabetes; 125M will develop foot ulcer(s) and 20M will undergo an amputation, creating a major health problem. Understanding how these wounds become chronic will provide insights to reverse chronicity. We hypothesized that oxidative stress (OS) in wounds is a critical component for generation of chronicity. We used the db/db mouse model of impaired healing and inhibited, at time of injury, two major antioxidant enzymes, catalase and glutathione peroxidase, creating high OS in the wounds. This was necessary and sufficient to trigger wounds to become chronic. The wounds initially contained a polymicrobial community that with time selected for specific biofilm-forming bacteria. To reverse chronicity we treated the wounds with the antioxidant