Welcome to our Skin Grafts and Transplants blog! Here we hope to detail the procedure, recent issues, research, and relevance to health care policy in the field of skin grafts and transplants.

Skin is the largest organ of the human body, represents about 16% of the total body weight, and covers the large majority of the body. As the external covering of the body, skin is the first line of defense against infection from pathogens in the environment. Skin also provides the sensation of touch and pressure, prevents water loss, insulates the body, and regulates body temperature. Therefore, it is an essential barrier and mediator to the outside world that must be maintained. Primary methods to restore irreversibly damaged skin include skin grafts and transplants.

Skin grafting is a step on the reconstructive ladder for wounds that cannot be closed primarily. The "reconstructive ladder" is a generalized term coined to describe complex stepwise procedure to treat physical external injury. Skin grafting is categorized into five distinct types: Autologous (donor and recipient are the same), Isogeneic (donor and recipient are genetically identical), Allogeneic (donor and recipient are same species), xenogeneic (donor and recipient are of different species), and prosthetic (replacement of lost tissue by synthetic materials).

Monday, November 16, 2009

Non-Contact Normothermic Wound Treatment


Non-Contact Normothermic Wound Treatment
Picture: http://www.woundsresearch.com/files/wounds/imagecache/normal/photos/gouldfig1.jpg

My purpose for this week was to find articles that reflected the
possible complications associated with skin grafts. In particular, I
ascertained the possible problems of efficacy in the NNWT (Non-Contact
Normothermic Wound Treatment) of severe wounds. This kind of
treatment involves a device stationed in close proximity to the wound
and the application of heat to the area in order to induce immune
cells and kill bacteria, among other effects. The controversy of this
treatment is whether NNWT is efficacious for treating acute wounds in
addition to chronic wounds. The first article deals with an
experiment conducted to see if NNWT is indeed efficacious in treating
Split Thickness Skin Grafts. The results proved that NNWT does not
heal STSG as well as chronic skin grafts because the added moisture
produced on the wound by the heat in NNWT caused exudates a protein
that triggers inflammatory cells and thus retards the healing process.
As such, it is better to find a way to decrease such moisture so that
the skin and the grafts attached to it can epithelialize properly, but
NNWT clearly does not achieve this.
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