Apr 20, 2023 07:00:00

Applying electricity to the skin can speed up wound healing by three times

Just as electrical

therapy, which involves passing electricity through the human body as part of physical therapy, has been shown to have various health benefits and cures for illnesses. A Swedish and German research team recently announced research results showing that 'passing electricity through the skin can triple the speed at which wounds heal,' and it is expected that this could be useful in treating chronic wounds caused by diabetes.

Bioelectronic microfluidic wound healing: a platform for investigating direct current stimulation of injured cell collectives - Lab on a Chip (RSC Publishing)
https://doi.org/10.1039/D2LC01045C

How electricity can heal wounds three times as fast | Chalmers
https://www.chalmers.se/en/current/news/mc2-how-electricity-can-heal-wounds-three-times-as-fast/

Electricity can heal even the worst kind of wounds three times faster, new study finds
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/electricity-can-heal-chronic-wounds

For most people, small wounds on the body are not a big problem, but people with diabetes, cancer, or circulatory disorders may have a impaired ability to heal wounds, leading to chronic wounds. It is known that in diabetic patients in particular, persistent hyperglycemia makes it difficult for hemoglobin to release oxygen, which slows wound healing.

Chronic wounds are a serious problem because slow wound healing not only increases the risk of infection, but can ultimately lead to amputation. 'Chronic injuries are a little-known but huge problem in society,' says Maria Asplund, an associate professor of bioelectronics at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.

So Asplund and his team conducted an experiment to see whether electrically stimulating human skin could speed up wound healing.

Although the idea of 'healing wounds with electrical stimulation' seems strange at first glance, the hypothesis that 'human skin cells are charged and move directional when exposed to

an electric field (electric field) ' has long been held. In other words, if a petri dish containing wounded skin is exposed to an electric field, the skin cells may start to move in one direction and the wound may heal faster.

The team created a biochip containing cultured skin cells with similar properties to human skin cells, then wounded two of the chips, one of which was allowed to heal with an electrical stimulus and the other was allowed to heal without it, to compare how quickly the skin cells healed in each case.

The results showed that the skin on the side that received the electrical stimulation healed three times faster than the skin on the other side. 'We've shown that a long-standing hypothesis about electrical stimulation can be shown to significantly speed up wound healing,' says Asplund.

The team then performed similar experiments on skin cells modeling the slower wound healing process caused by diabetes, suggesting that the diabetic skin cells healed at a similar speed to normal skin cells.

'We found that when we mimicked diabetes in the cells, the wounds on the chip healed very slowly,' Asplund said. 'But by applying an electrical stimulus, we were able to speed up the healing process, making the diabetes-affected cells heal almost as well as healthy skin cells.'

The Chalmers University of Technology research team has received a grant to continue their research into using electrical stimulation to speed up wound healing, with the potential to develop wound-healing products for the future. Asplund said he hopes to develop a concept that can scan individual wounds and deliver the appropriate electrical stimulation to effectively help people with slow-healing wounds.