Chronic wounds like ‘veggie soup’
University of South Australia PhD student, Carla Daunton, will give a presentation on chronic wound diagnostics at the Tran-Tasman Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition next month. Ms Daunton recently – and strangely enough – used an analogy of vegetable soup to explain how her research into chronic wounds would develop a diagnostic test that could save Australia millions of dollars every year.
University of South Australia PhD student, Carla Daunton, will give a presentation on chronic wound diagnostics at the Tran-Tasman Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition next month.
Ms Daunton recently and strangely enough used an analogy of vegetable soup to explain how her research into chronic wounds will develop a diagnostic test that could save the Australian economy millions of dollars every year.
“Chronic wounds are injuries to the skin that fail to heal properly, typically lasting a minimum of three months,” Ms Daunton says.
“Someone can very easily develop a wound on their foot and not even know it’s there. If the wound continues to worsen, the result can often be amputation of the limb. There is no effective diagnosis at the moment.”
Ms Daunton is developing a diagnostic that will inform a clinician on whether a wound is healing properly or whether it is starting to become chronic.
She describes the fluid inside a wound “a bit like a veggie soup – it’s thick and full of many different things like proteins”.
“Hundreds of millions of people are suffering from chronic wounds around the world and they cost the Australian economy $2.6b a year. Chronic wounds can also seriously impact on a sufferer’s quality of life, affecting productivity and mobility,” she says.
Ms Daunton was one of nine finalists to compete at the UniSA 3MT Competition this month, after preliminary rounds took place across the University’s divisions. PhD students were judged on their communication style and their capacity to explain their research to an intelligent, but non-specialist audience.
Ms Daunton will head to the University of Queensland on October 11 to compete against researchers from more than 40 universities across Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and the South Pacific at the Trans-Tasman Competition.
