Spraying leg ulcers with a skin cell mixture may speed up healing compared with the conventional treatment, American and Canadian doctors have found.

The ulcers develop when high blood pressure in the veins of the legs damages the skin, causing it to break down and form an ulcer. Chronic venous leg ulcers last longer than two years on average, an earlier German study suggested.

Standard treatments for leg ulcers include compression bandages, infection control and dressings. (iStock)

In Friday's issue of the medical journal The Lancet, doctors said spraying skin cells suspended in a mixture of proteins that aid blood clotting helped to heal wounds faster and increased the likelihood of wound closure compared with a control group that just used compression bandages.

In the study, 205 patients in the U.S. and Canada were randomly assigned to one of four doses of the cell therapy along with compression or compression alone as a placebo.

Participants were adults who had at least one ulcer that was between two to 12 square centimetres and had lasted six to 104 weeks.

Patients were assessed weekly for 12 weeks or until the wounds healed without drainage or need for dressing. Doctors made a final assessment after another two weeks of wearing the compression bandages.

Higher costs may be worth it

After applying the lowest dose every 14 days, the average reduction in wound area was 40 per cent compared with 23 per cent for the placebo group, Dr. Herbert Slade of Healthpoint Biotherapeutics in Fort Worth, Texas, and his co-authors reported.

By the end of the study, the average wound area shrank by 91 per cent compared with 80 per cent in the bandage only group. "The treatment we tested in this study has the potential to vastly improve recovery times and overall recovery from leg ulcers, without the need for a skin graft," Slade said in a release.

Most adverse reactions were non-serious and they were equally common in the treatment and control groups.

The study only looked at ulcers that were a maximum of 12 square centimeters in size, which they said represents about 80 per cent of venous leg ulcers but a smaller proportion of chronic ones.

Compression bandages will remain the basis of treatment for venous leg ulcers, Dr. Matthias Augustin of the University Medical Centre in Hamburg, Germany, said in a journal commentary published with the study.

"Hard-to-heal ulcers do need additional therapy," Augustin said.

"In these wounds, prolonged futile, conservative treatment will increase costs without additional benefit. Therefore, the temporary higher costs for additional cell therapy can be justified as an investment in improved healing."

Given the aging population of most societies, the combination of venous insufficiency and artery disease will continue to grow, the editorial concluded.

Healthpoint is a privately-owned company and several of the authors received consulting fees.