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Summary Electrical underwear that prevents painful bed sores has been developed by scientists.
The Smart-e-Pants generate tiny pulses of electricity which stimulate the muscles, relieving pressure and boosting blood supply to paralysed and bed-bound patients.If routinely distributed in hospitals, they could help prevent the bed sores or pressure ulcers that blight almost half a million Britons a year and cost the NHS billions.The Smart-e-Pants look like normal underwear but contain special pouches at the back for electrode pads.These pads, which sit on the buttocks, deliver tiny electric shocks which trick the muscles into contracting.This relieves pressure and boosts the supply of blood, oxygen and nutrients to area, stopping the tissue and muscle from dying.Although bed sores are often dismissed as a minor problem, the worst can eat right through to the bone, allowing potentially lethal gangrene or blood poisoning to takehold.Superman actor Christopher Reeve died of complications due to pressure ulcers in 2004, nine years after he had been left paralysed by a riding accident.Researcher Robyn Warwaruk Rogers said: ‘Pressure ulcers can be terrible debilitating.In a preliminary trial, 33 severely ill men and women, including victims of car and motorcycle crashes, people with broken hips and multiple sclerosis and diabetic patients, wore the hi-tech underwear for four days a week for up to two months.The Smart-e-Pants gave them tiny electric shocks for ten seconds every ten minutes for 12 hours a day.Using current techniques, including special mattresses and the regular turning of patients, between 10 and 30 per cent of severely ill hospital patients will develop pressure ulcers.But all of those trialling the electric underwear remained sore-free, the Society for Neuroscience’s annual conference in New Orleans heard.The trial also proved the pants to be safe and showed the patients to like them and the nurses to believe them to be worth using.If a large-scale trial is equally successful, the underwear could be on sale in just three years, said University of Calgary researcher Sean Dukelow.He said: ‘Pressure ulcers have multi-billion-dollar-a-year costs in Canada, the US and the UK.‘This has shown us that the Smart-e-Pants are safe and feasible and what were really need to do now is prove in a very large sample of people that they work, so that you actually prevent pressure ulcers.‘If it does and you can prove that then you come into the hospital into the intensive care unit, you get put in stockings to prevent deep vein thrombosis and you get a pair of smart pants put on to prevent pressure ulcers, then the nurses and the doctors can go about their regular business in terms of saving your life.’Dr Dukelow, who specialises in the rehabilitation of patients, added that the technology could be adapted to protect other parts of the body prone to develop sores in the bed-bound, including the shoulder blades, back of the head and the heels.Diabetics, who often develop hard-to-heal ulcers, could also benefit.
