Healing Rate and Time to Closure of Venous Leg Ulcers: A Real-World Service Evaluation of Neuromuscular Electrostimulation as an Adjunct to Compression Therapy.
Holly Murray, Rochelle Duong, Duncan Shirreffs Bain
PMID 40184497WHAT IT FOUND
Adding electrical stimulation of the common peroneal nerve to compression was associated with faster wound closure in 15 patients with venous leg ulcers: 0.56 mm/week versus 0.31 mm/week, and 40 versus 77 days to heal.
Key findings
01Wound margin advanced toward the wound center faster with NMES plus multilayer compression than with compression alone: 0.56 mm/week versus 0.31 mm/week.
02Mean time to complete closure was 40 days with NMES plus multilayer compression and 77 days with compression alone.
03All wounds in both groups healed, and patient-reported adherence to NMES was 100% with no adverse incidents.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
Only 15 patients were treated with NMES plus compression and 15 historical controls were compared. The groups were not randomized, and the controls were matched only for ulcer size and duration, so other differences could have affected healing. Patients and assessors were not blinded, and the same staff applied the treatments and measured the wounds. No sociodemographic data were available for the retrospective controls, so possible confounding was not checked. Wound size was measured as length times width, which approximates the wound as a rectangle. The patients had relatively small ulcers of 3 months or less, so results may not apply to larger or long-standing ulcers.
Declared interests
No funding source or conflict-of-interest declaration is given in the supplied text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that NMES alone heals venous leg ulcers. It was used with multilayer compression, and the study compared a NMES-plus-compression group with historical compression-only controls without randomization or blinding.