Burns : journal of the International Society for Burn Injuries
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Residential fires account for the majority of burn-related injuries and fatalities. Established risk factors for burn injury include male gender, racial minority, children and elderly individuals, poverty, and substandard housing characteristics. In North Carolina, the rate of residential fire injuries and deaths is higher than the national average. Therefore, we sought to describe residential fire hospitalizations at a large regional burn center and describe the neighborhoods in which they live. We hypothesized that patients living in areas with higher Area Deprivation Index (ADI) are more likely to have major residential burns. ⋯ Residential structure fires represent the major source of burns and fatalities. People who reside in the highest ADI quartile are more like to present with higher burn injury severity in terms of burn size and the presence of inhalation injury. The use of the ADI to target neighborhoods for burn prevention is imperative.
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This paper presents a mathematical model of blood volume kinetics and renal function in response to burn injury and resuscitation, which is applicable to the development and non-clinical testing of burn resuscitation protocols and algorithms. Prior mathematical models of burn injury and resuscitation are not ideally suited to such applications due to their limited credibility in predicting blood volume and urinary output observed in wide-ranging burn patients as well as in incorporating contemporary knowledge of burn pathophysiology. ⋯ Using the dataset collected from 16 sheep, we showed that our mathematical model can be characterized with physiologically plausible parameter values to accurately predict blood volume kinetic and renal function responses to burn injury and resuscitation on an individual basis against a wide range of pathophysiological variability. Pending validation in humans, our mathematical model may serve as an effective basis for in-depth understanding of complex burn-induced volume kinetic and renal function responses as well as development and non-clinical testing of burn resuscitation protocols and algorithms.