By Wendy Haaf
If you have chronic swelling in your legs that’s lasted three months or more, compression stockings could sharply reduce the chances of your developing a serious skin infection known as cellulitis. To test the effect of these garments, researchers recruited 84 adults (average age: 64) with chronic leg edema who’d had at least two episodes of cellulitis in the same leg. Participants were randomly assigned either to an education-only group or to a group given education plus a compression garment (typically knee high with a foot but no toes).
The results were so impressive that researchers halted the trial early—the rate of cellulitis was more than twice as high in the education-only cohort (40 percent) as in those who got the garments (15 percent).
Source: American Family Physician
Photo by Nynne Schrøder on Unsplash
