Manchester research group wins second prestigious US grant
July 2007University of Manchester researchers have won a $1.5M National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to investigate how emotional distress can affect wound healing.
A number of studies have demonstrated that stress can damage the immune system, especially in healing of acute wounds, and is detrimental for general health. However Dr Loretta Vileikyte and the Dialex Research Group, which investigates how diabetes affects the lower limbs and feet, are to spend four years studying how it affects chronic wounds such as diabetic foot ulcers.
They will examine two potential routes by which generalized distress (perceived stress, anxiety and depression) and foot ulcer-specific emotional responses (fear of the consequences of a foot ulcer, such as amputation) impact on the healing of chronic diabetic foot ulcers and will assess markers of healing using biopsies from wounds. This study will investigate the potential physiological route, the elevated levels of cortisol in response to emotional distress, and the behavioural path, that is, the patients' unwillingness or inability to follow wound care recommendations while in distress.
Dr Vileikyte, who has spoken to 16,000 delegates at the American Diabetes Association and 800 delegates at the American Wound Healing Conference, said: "There have been a series of studies in the US, which demonstrated that both chronic stress (caring for a relative with Alzheimer's disease) and short, commonplace stressors (taking academic examinations) slow down the healing of acute, experimentally induced wounds.
"However chronic wounds are different entities to acute wounds so the cellular mechanisms by which stress affects acute wound healing cannot be applied to chronic wound healing. With 85% of amputations resulting from a foot ulcer, there needs to be a study of the potential impact of emotional distress on healing of diabetic foot ulcers."
This is the second NIH Grant won by the Dialex Research Group, and includes a number of prominent scientists from both sides of the Atlantic: Professors Andrew Boulton and Gillian Ashcroft and Dr Edward Jude in Manchester and Professors Neal Schneiderman and Robert Kirsner and Dr Biing Shen in Miami.
