March 20 (Bloomberg) -- Maggots are no better in healing wounds than a commonly used gel, a study suggests.

Nurses placed either the worm-like creatures or a hydrogel and surgical dressing on patients’ leg ulcers to remove dead, damaged or infected tissue. The maggots cleared away tissue faster, though wounds healed in the same amount of time in both groups, according to the study, published today in the British Medical Journal. Maggots were also more painful for patients.

The results surprised lead study author Nicky Cullum, a wound-care researcher at the University of York in England, and run counter to claims maggots are superior to conventional wound dressing in both cost and healing properties. The researchers found no evidence that maggot therapy should be recommended for routine use on leg ulcers. Maggots were approved for medical use in 2004 in both the U.K. and the U.S.

“Maggots, although they sped the cleaning, didn’t speed the healing of the wound,” Cullum said in an interview. “Both treatments had a similar cost, but the maggots led to more pain.”

The study, the first trial to have randomly assigned patients to either treatment, used the larvae of the green bottle fly. Maggots eat only diseased tissue, a characteristic noticed by people around the world centuries ago. One of the earliest European medical texts, “Hortus Sanitatus,” mentioned the use of maggots when it was published in Germany in 1491.

Modern maggot therapy was established by William Baer, a professor of orthopedic surgery at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, who observed the success of the treatment in World War I.

50,000 Treatments

Globally, about 50,000 treatments were applied to wounds in 2008, according to the Web site of Monarch Labs, an Irvine, California-based supplier of medical maggots. BioMonde GmbH, a German maggot supplier, has seen sales rise about 10 percent every year for the past decade to about 2 million euros ($2.7 million) annually, Normen Schmidt, the company’s accountant, said in a telephone interview.

The three-year study followed 267 patients with at least one ulcer caused by pressure in the veins. Patients who were given maggots saw their ulcers heal in 236 days compared to 245 days for those who received a gel dressing, though the results were not statistically significant. The time to wound-cleansing was twice as fast with the maggots, the study said. Maggot therapy cost, on average, 96.70 pounds ($140.65) more per participant per year, according to a separate paper published today.

The researchers also found that maggots didn’t reduce the number of a type of bacterium called MRSA, or methicillin- resistant Staphylococcus aureus.

The patients treated with maggots experienced more pain, Cullum said. “Some patients had the maggots removed because they found it unbearably painful.”

The research was limited by the fact that patient recruitment was difficult, due to the unforeseen scarcity of the wound needed, not the maggot treatment itself, Cullum said. “Surprisingly, people were disappointed when they were allocated to hydrogel.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Eva von Schaper in Munich at evonschaper@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: March 19, 2009 20:01 EDT