Carcinogenesis and diabetic wound healing: evidences of parallelism

There is a close association of chronic tissue damage, inflammation and cancer. A chronic injury may contribute to sustained healing response leading to fibrosis, organ failure and carcinogenesis. Wounds created due to mechanical or patho-physiological insults, generally follow a sophisticated series of mutually coherent steps leading to the re-establishment of the affected tissue or organ. The process of wound healing resembles fundamental processes like embryogenesis and tissue regeneration. All the stages in the wound healing process are tightly regulated and any sort of imbalance may lead to either non healing chronic ulcers or excessively healed hypertrophic scars. Diabetic wounds are also very tough to heal and in many cases they do not heal, ultimately resulting in the amputation of that body part. The non-healing property of diabetic wounds may be due to combined effect of intrinsic and extrinsic factors. In this review, we aimed to explore the steps involved in diabetic wound healing and compare it with the process of carcinogenesis. This review demonstrates that both carcinogenesis and the diabetic wound healing follow a similar path of latent healing in an abnormal exaggerated manner.