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The optimal approaches to managing diabetic foot infections remain a challenge for clinicians. Despite an exponential rise in publications investigating different treatment strategies, the various agents studied generally produce comparable results, and high-quality data are scarce. In this systematic review, we searched the medical literature using the PubMed and Embase databases for published studies on the treatment of diabetic foot infections as of June 2018. This systematic review is an update of previous reviews, the first of which was undertaken in 2010 and the most recent in 2014, by the infection committee of the International Working Group of the Diabetic Foot. We defined the context of literature by formulating clinical questions of interest, then developing structured clinical questions (PICOs) to address these. We only included data from controlled studies of an intervention to prevent or cure a diabetic foot infection. Two independent reviewers selected articles for inclusion and then assessed their relevant outcomes and the methodological quality. Our literature search identified a total of 15 327 articles, of which we selected 48 for full-text review; we added five more studies discovered by means other than the systematic literature search. Among these selected articles were 11 high-quality studies published in the last 4 years and two Cochrane systematic reviews. Overall, the outcomes in patients treated with the different antibiotic regimens for both skin and soft tissue infection and osteomyelitis of the diabetic foot were broadly equivalent across studies, except that treatment with tigecycline was inferior to ertapenem (±vancomycin). Similar outcomes were also reported in studies comparing primarily surgical and predominantly antibiotic treatment strategies in selected patients with diabetic foot osteomyelitis. There is insufficient high-quality evidence to assess the effect of various adjunctive therapies, such as negative pressure wound therapy, topical ointments or hyperbaric oxygen, on infection related outcomes of the diabetic foot. In general, the quality of more recent trial designs are better in past years, but there is still a great need for further well-designed trials to produce higher quality evidence to underpin our recommendations.

The expert panel on diabetic foot infection (DFI) of the International Working Group on the Diabetic Foot conducted a systematic review seeking all published reports relating to any type of treatment for infection of the foot in persons with diabetes published as of 30 June 2014. This review, conducted with both PubMed and EMBASE, was used to update an earlier one undertaken on 30 June 2010 using the same search string. Eligible publications included those that had outcome measures reported for both a treated and a control population that were managed either at the same time, or as part of a before-and-after case design. We did not include studies that contained only information related to definition or diagnosis, but not treatment, of DFI. The current search identified just seven new articles meeting our criteria that were published since the 33 identified with the previous search, making a total of 40 articles from the world literature. The identified articles included 37 randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and three cohort studies with concurrent controls, and included studies on the use of surgical procedures, topical antiseptics, negative pressure wound therapy and hyperbaric oxygen. Among the studies were 15 RCTs that compared outcomes of treatment with new antibiotic preparations compared with a conventional therapy in the management of skin and soft tissue infection. In addition, 10 RCTs and 1 cohort study compared different treatments for osteomyelitis in the diabetic foot. Results of comparisons of different antibiotic regimens generally demonstrated that newly introduced antibiotic regimens appeared to be as effective as conventional therapy (and also more cost-effective in one study), but one study failed to demonstrate non-inferiority of a new antibiotic compared with that of a standard agent. Overall, the available literature was both limited in both the number of studies and the quality of their design. Thus, our systematic review revealed little evidence upon which to make recommendations for treatment of DFIs. There is a great need for further well-designed trials that will provide robust data upon which to make decisions about the most appropriate treatment of both skin and soft tissue infection and osteomyelitis in diabetic patients.