Aesthetic plastic surgery
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Aesthetic plastic surgery · Sep 2003
Clinical TrialImproved scar quality following primary and secondary healing of cutaneous wounds.
Poor wound healing remains a critical problem in our daily practice of surgery, exerting a heavy toll on our patients as well as on the health care system. In susceptible individuals, scars can become raised, reddish, and rigid, may cause itching and pain, and might even lead to serious cosmetic and functional problems. Hypertrophic scars do not occur spontaneously in animals, which explains the lack of experimental models for the study of pathologic scar modulation. ⋯ In the second study, secondary healing of partial thickness skin graft donor sites was evaluated following treatment with Tegaderm or MEBO, two different types of moisture-retentive dressings. In the second and third studies, healed wounds were evaluated with the quantitative scale for scar assessment described by Beausang et al. Statistical analysis revealed that for both types of wound healing, scar quality was significantly superior in those wounds treated with MEBO.