Introduction:

to arrive to an adequate and precocious diagnosis of the diabetic foot infection, it is necessary to obtain a qualitative bacteriological sample to identify the causing germ.

Objective:

to identify possible relationships between the results obtained both, in the culture made through superficial swab and the culture obtained from deep tissues biopsy in the diabetic foot infection.

Materials and methods:

a prospective, longitudinal, observational, explicative study was carried out in the Provincial Service of Angiology and Vascular Surgery of Provincial University Clinical Surgical Hospital “Comandante Faustino Pérez”, in a period of three years, from January 2016 to December 2018. A non-probabilistic sampling choose a sample of 138 lower limbs in 132 patients with clinical diagnosis of infected diabetic foot, who required surgery for lesion debridement. They gave their consent to be included in the research; for the isolation of the casual germ were used both culture methods, superficial swab and deep tissues biopsy.

Results:

the average of isolated microorganism increased in relation to the severity of the diabetic food infection, with higher increase in the isolation obtained by superficial swab. The superficial swab shows poor correlation with the germ isolates by the culture the deep tissue biopsy.

Conclusions:

the samples should be gathered preferably by curettage. In the diagnosis of the diabetic foot infection, it is very useful, due to its speed and concordance with the culture results, to make always a Gram staining beginning from the same place.

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