Electrical Stimulation Therapy Increases Rate of Healing of Pressure Ulcers in Community-Dwelling People With Spinal Cord Injury

Electrical Stimulation Therapy and Wound Healing: Where Are We Now?

“…10 Color images available online at www.liebertpub.com/wound area decreased significantly in the ES group compared with the standard of care group. 17 Limited drawbacks of this study are that (1) the study size was relatively small (34 subjects) and (2) ES test protocols were varied to accommodate to the patient and caregiver skills, making it difficult to analyze what treatment was actually delivered. Yet, a major advance of this study is the demonstration that ES could be effectively delivered in the community, or at home, and did not need to be relegated to the clinic with direct oversight by healthcare providers.…”

“…17 This study is well controlled, matching cases and controls, stratifying for wound duration, with additional secondary outcome measurement of wound quality assessment, and with 3 months of follow-up period. The results showed that wound Figure 1.…”

“…Nevertheless, there were issues with compliance, as the authors noted the patients were less likely to wear ES for full 8 h recommended while sleeping, but those who had complied had better outcomes. 17 This study may translate into expanded reimbursements by third-party insurers to include home ES use; at this time, reimbursement is only available for ES applied under direct supervision of a professional healthcare provider.…”

Electrical stimulation therapy to promote healing of chronic wounds: a review of reviews

“…Table 2 is a summary of controlled clinical trials where E-Stim was used to treat three of the main types of chronic wounds (pressure injuries, [28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44] venous ulcers and other wounds of the lower extremity, [45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53] and diabetic and/or ischemic ulcers [54][55][56][57][58][59][60] ). This chart of controlled clinical trials does not include three studies that were found to have the same data presented in another publication -referred to as …”

“…[61][62][63] Twenty-two of these 33 studies used a prospective randomized study design where wound healing outcomes were collected systematically using valid outcome measures and well over 80% of subjects completed the study protocol. [29][30][31]33,34,37,39,[42][43][44][45][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57]59 Although data from a control group that did not receive EST was included in the report and analyses, eleven studies had key methodological flaws and were labeled "controlled trial" (CT) since they did not use a random allocation method 36,38,40 or involved fewer than 10 subjects per group. 28,35,38,41,46,47,58,60 The majority of the controlled studies involved the use of relatively small number of subjects and seldom were the large-scale multicenter trials coordinated by industry.…”