Chronic wounds quietly consume beds, nursing hours and health budgets. For UAE doctors, hospital leaders and clinic owners, LDM® Triple offers a non-invasive way to support stalled wounds alongside standard care.
A bigger problem than it looks
The International Diabetes Federation estimates that 1.27 million adults in the UAE were living with diabetes in 2024. That is one adult in six, against one in nine worldwide. Nearly two thirds of those cases (64%) are thought to be undiagnosed, which means blood glucose that nobody is managing.
Foot ulcers are the most common lower-limb complication of diabetes. Around 18.6 million people worldwide are affected by one every year, and between 19% and 34% of people with diabetes will have one in their lifetime. These ulcers precede 80% of lower-limb amputations in people with diabetes, and around 30% of patients with a diabetic foot ulcer die within five years, rising above 70% after a major amputation.
Add venous leg ulcers, pressure injuries and surgical wounds that break down, and the pool grows. In a Gulf climate, hot pavements, sand and open footwear raise the stakes for anyone who has lost sensation in their feet.
Why some wounds stop healing
A healthy wound closes because skin cells at its edge migrate across it. In a chronic wound, that migration stalls.
A University of Miami team, publishing in Communications Biology in 2021, found raised levels of cortisol and the membrane protein caveolin-1 (Cav-1) in diabetic foot ulcers and venous leg ulcers. Excess Cav-1 disrupted the internal scaffolding that cells need to move. When Cav-1 was switched off in mouse skin cells, or disrupted with a drug in diabetic mice, wounds closed faster.
That makes Cav-1 a credible therapeutic target. Bring it back towards normal, and the wound edge has a better chance of moving again.
How LDM® Triple works
LDM® Triple, developed by Wellcomet in Germany, uses very high frequency ultrasound across four frequencies: 1, 3, 10 and 19 MHz. In triple mode it switches between three of them every one to ten milliseconds. That is faster than tissue can respond to each frequency separately, so cells receive a single combined stimulus.
It works through fine mechanical stress rather than heat damage. Wellcomet’s scientific lead, Dr Ilja Kruglikov, proposes that this stress changes membrane tension and the cell’s internal scaffolding, which regulates Cav-1. In chronic wounds, where Cav-1 runs high, the aim is to bring it back towards physiological levels. Earlier work on the technology also describes effects on matrix metalloproteinases and heat shock proteins, both central to how damaged tissue rebuilds.
This is a proposed mechanism, set out in peer-reviewed review papers and consistent with independent wound biology, rather than one yet measured directly in treated human wounds.
For open wounds, the applicator is worked over a layer of sterile ultrasound gel without touching the wound bed.
What the clinical evidence shows
The published wound data comes from Wellcomet’s earlier dual-frequency LDM®-MED system, the platform on which LDM® Triple builds.
At Soonchunhyang University Hospital in Korea, plastic surgeons treated eight patients whose wounds had not healed after skin grafts or flap surgery, including two with radiation ulcers. Every wound fully re-epithelialised without further surgery, and patients reported no pain or discomfort during treatment. A separate case report from the same group describes a long-standing venous leg ulcer that fully re-epithelialised after 21 sessions over five weeks, with the patient’s pain resolved.
Wellcomet’s clinical case files extend this experience to diabetic foot, pressure ulcers and burns in Germany, Korea and Russia.
These are case series and case reports rather than randomised trials, and they should be read that way. What they show consistently is stalled wounds moving to closure. The next step for this region is structured outcome data from UAE centres, and hospitals that adopt LDM® Triple early are best placed to lead it.
What faster healing means for private hospitals
Every week a wound stays open carries costs that rarely sit on one line of a budget.
- Bed days. Faster closure supports earlier step-down from inpatient to outpatient care, returning beds to elective and higher-acuity work.
- Fewer returns to theatre. Wounds that break down after grafts, flaps or reconstruction can lead to further surgery. A non-invasive route to closure helps avoid it.
- Less time exposed to infection. Between 50% and 60% of diabetic foot ulcers become infected. A wound that closes sooner spends less time at risk.
- Lighter nursing and clinic load. Fewer dressing changes and fewer outpatient visits per patient.
- A stronger wound care service. Referrers, insurers and patients look for hospitals that can show measurable healing outcomes.
What it means for government health budgets
For government payers funding citizens’ care, chronic wounds are among the most open-ended costs in the system. A wound that heals weeks sooner returns bed days, specialist nursing hours and clinic capacity. An amputation avoided removes years of rehabilitation, prosthetics and home care, and keeps a patient mobile, independent and working
Faster healing also supports the UAE’s ambition, under We the UAE 2031, to rank among the top ten countries in the world for healthcare quality.
Where LDM® Triple fits in the pathway
LDM® Triple is an adjunct to standard wound care, not a replacement for it. Debridement, offloading, infection control, treatment of limb ischaemia, glycaemic management and early multidisciplinary referral remain the foundations, and every patient needs a vascular assessment before starting.
Results land best when treatment is delivered by trained clinicians, sessions are frequent and consistent, and wound area and time to closure are recorded from the first session. Wellcomet’s guidance is that treatment frequency matters more than intensity.
Bring LDM® Triple into your wound care service
Anglo Arab Trading supplies LDM® Triple in the UAE and supports hospitals and clinics with clinical training, protocol set-up and implementation. If you lead a wound care, diabetic foot, plastic surgery or dermatology service, speak to our team about how LDM® Triple could fit your pathway.
References
- International Diabetes Federation. IDF Diabetes Atlas, 11th edition. Brussels: IDF; 2025. Global factsheet, country table: United Arab Emirates, 2024 estimates.
- Armstrong DG, Tan TW, Boulton AJM, Bus SA. Diabetic foot ulcers: a review. JAMA. 2023;330(1):62-75. doi:10.1001/jama.2023.10578
- Armstrong DG, Boulton AJM, Bus SA. Diabetic foot ulcers and their recurrence. N Engl J Med. 2017;376(24):2367-2375. doi:10.1056/NEJMra1615439
- Jozic I, Abujamra BA, Elliott MH, et al. Glucocorticoid-mediated induction of caveolin-1 disrupts cytoskeletal organization, inhibits cell migration and re-epithelialization of non-healing wounds. Commun Biol. 2021;4(1):757. doi:10.1038/s42003-021-02298-5
- Kruglikov IL, Scherer PE. Caveolin as a universal target in dermatology. Int J Mol Sci. 2019;21(1):80. doi:10.3390/ijms21010080. Dr Kruglikov works for Wellcomet GmbH, the manufacturer of LDM® Triple.
- Lee WS, Park ES, Kang SG, Tak MS, Kim CH. Successful treatment of recalcitrant remaining postoperative wounds by dual-frequency ultrasound. Med Lasers. 2018;7(2):74-78. doi:10.25289/ML.2018.7.2.74
- Choi YS, Nam SM, Park ES. Clinical experience of an effective treatment of intractable chronic venous ulcer on the lower leg using dual-frequency ultrasound. Med Lasers. 2017;6(1):29-31. doi:10.25289/ML.2017.6.1.29