Thanks, resourced, for asking and reporting the answer...
I suspect that is a Clayton's answer... the answer you give to avoid saying stuff you may not be allowed to say...
Fair enough...asx rules, etc.
I have been reading up on healing trajectory of patients with VLUs getting compression bandaging.
There seems to be a great variation in reported healing rates.
Essentially, the best form of treatment is compression bandaging, and in particular the Coban2 two-layered bandage that FTT's study has used. So I feel comforted knowing that if a treatment effect of FTT's potion shows up, at least it has been tested against the best standard care in compression bandaging at moment, and someone can’t say later, “but is the potion with that coban2 bandaging as good as XXX bandaging on its own, which is the much cheaper option.”
We just need the FTT to work!
The other thing i noticed is that most patients with a new ulcer respond quickly to compression bandaging applied properly. There does seem to be a bit of skill involved on nurse's part, and compliance on patient's part, so you would expect better healing in carefully conducted clinical studies than in the general community.
Also, it appears that while most patients respond quickly to compression bandaging and heal within weeks, some don’t.
I need to reassure myself that the FTT subjects fall more into the “tried compression bandaging and didn’t respond so well straight away” group.
What we know is that all subjects had to have had compression bandaging of some kind for at least a month just prior to entering study, and then they had two weeks of “perfect” compression bandaging. Any one who showed greater than 30% healing in those two weeks got kicked out...but we don’t know if in fact anyone did get kicked out.
But at least we know that by the time the study officially started, every subject had at least 6weeks of compression bandaging having a chance to do its magic on their ulcer, and any remaining bit of ulcer represents the “hard to heal” bit.
One thing that has freaked me out a bit reading up on other VLU trials is that our subjects are limited to those whose ulcers are no bigger than 20 square cms, whereas other studies are including subjects with humongous ulcers, and one study even reported a mean ulcer size of over 40 square cm! Our subject ulcers topping out at 20 square cm are puny in comparison to what could be!
I hope most of FTT's subjects fall into the “had ulcer for longer than 6 months” category (and I hope they spent most of that ulcer time receiving diligent compression bandaging) rather than “ulcer was between6 and 20 square cm” category!
...
Another thing I noticed was that a surprising number of patients in many other compression bandaging studies asked to switch to a different kind of bandaging... they especially didn’t like the four-layer bulky type of bandage.
It is excellent that our subjects have stuck it out with their bandaging (I presume if they insisted on changing bandaging treatment, they would be regarded as treatment dropouts).
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The other thing I have worked out is that I don’t want to get a VLU..
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