Foot Thermometers Help Diabetics Keep Limbs

WASHINGTON — Diabetics, watch out: A hot spot on your foot can signal an ulcer is brewing, a wound that could cost your limb.

New research shows that using a special thermometer to measure the temperature of their soles can give patients enough early warning to avoid one of diabetes' most intractable complications.

It's a simple-sounding protection for such a huge problem. Foot ulcers each year strike 600,000 American diabetics, people slow to notice they even have a wound because diabetes has numbed their feet.

"They've lost the gift of pain," Dr. David Armstrong of Chicago's Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, a diabetic foot specialist, said.

Inflammation goes along with tissue injury, and inflammation can be measured by a bump in temperature. It's subtle — a minimum 4-degree difference between, say, your right big toe and your left one that can occur days before the skin breaks.

"A wound really will heat up before it breaks down," Dr. Armstrong explained.

Patients measure half a dozen spots on each foot. When the thermometer signals a hot spot, they put up their feet for a day or so until the temperature normalizes.