LAHORE: Pakistan and UK researchers` joint study has revealed that all sugars are not bad for health, as some can heal wounds such as diabetic and chronic ulcers in elderly people.

The Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the School of Clinical Dentistry at the University of Sheffield and the Interdisciplinary Research Centre in Biomedical Materials Research at Comsats Institute of Information Technology,Lahore, conducted the research and found that sugar can help in new blood vessels formation, also known as angiogenesis.

According to a press release, new blood vessel formation is crucial for wound healing as vessels carry blood around the body which ultimately supplies the body with oxygen and nutrients.

The new way of stimulating blood vessel formation with sugar uses a combination of simple and inexpensive sugar added to a hydrogel bandage. This successful method is simple and cost-effective than traditional methods. The new technique con-ceived and developed by the collaborative research group works because a specific group of sugars can stimulate skin healing.

Prof Sheila Mac Neil from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Sheffield said: `Throughout the world, people are living longer and unfortunately experiencing more non-healing skin wounds associated with age, poor blood supply and diabetes. These are often difhcult to treat and are very expensive for healthcare systems to manage. The new skin healing tech-nique using simple sugars promises to aid wound healing more simply, meaning patients would need less treatment, clinicians could treat more patients and significant savings could be made by national healthcare systems.

Doctor Muhammed Yar from Comsats Institute of Information Technology made the initial discovery during his research to understand how tumours stimulate new blood vessels. He found that a naturally occurring sugar (2-deoxy-D-ribose) increased when tumours encouraged new blood vessels to be made.