Why Chronic Ankle Ulcers Can Be Challenging

Between 1% and 3% of the older population in the United States develop venous ulcers in their lower limbs, and these wounds are problematic under the best of circumstances.

When an ulcer develops on your ankle, however, there are a few extra challenges that we need to tackle.

The good news is that double board-certified lower limb wound specialist Dr. Thomas Rambacher and his team are more than up to the challenge. In fact, we’ve dedicated our practice — Foot Ankle Leg Wound Care Orange County — to helping patients with chronic and difficult-to-heal foot, ankle, and leg wounds.

With that as our background, read on to learn about the challenges of ankle ulcers and how we surmount them.

Ankle ulcers: Where they come from

Diabetes is commonly associated with lower limb wounds, but many ankle and lower leg wounds stem from venous issues like chronic venous insufficiency (CVI), which affects 10% to 35% of adults in the US. In fact, about 80% to 90% of lower leg ulcers are venous stasis ulcers, which are largely tied back to CVI.

When you have CVI, the veins in your leg aren’t pushing the blood back up to your heart efficiently, which allows blood to pool in your legs. Over time, you can experience fluid buildup in your veins that seeps out into your tissues. As a result of this pressure, your skin is more vulnerable to ulceration.

Now combine this with your bony ankle joints and you can see why ulcers can easily develop around your ankles. And the same blood flow issue that caused your ankle ulcer now becomes the reason why it doesn't heal well. Resources, such as blood and oxygen, can’t access the ulcer as needed.

Treating chronic ankle ulcers

Now let’s look at why treating chronic ankle ulcers poses a few challenges. First, we turn to simple anatomy as our first challenge: it can be tough to dress an ankle wound as the joint is awkward to work around.

In addition, if you’re still moving around, dressings can be tough to maintain, and many people still move around with an ankle wound as opposed to a foot wound.

But these challenges are no match for our team and we know how to work around them. When it comes to ankle wounds, we have a complete toolkit that incudes:

• Debridement: cleaning the wound and removing debris and dead and infected tissue
• Prescription wound care products, including specialized dressings that work well on ankles
• Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injections to boost regenerative and healing resources to the wound
• Skin grafting to prevent infection and promote healing
• Surgical wound repair

As you can see, we have you well covered when it comes to slow-healing ankle wounds and we will work with you until the ulcer clears.

So, if you’re struggling with an ankle ulcer that’s showing no signs of improving, or it’s getting worse, please don’t delay in coming to see us. The longer you wait, the harder the wound can become to treat, placing you at higher risk for infection, gangrene, and potential amputation.

So, let’s go in a more productive direction and start with how you can sit down with Dr. Rambacher to go over your options for getting to the other side of your ankle ulcer. To get that ball rolling, please call our office in Mission Viejo, California, at 949-832-6018 or request an appointment online today.