Advances in skin & wound care
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Adv Skin Wound Care · May 2014
Comparative StudyClinical evaluation comparing the efficacy of aquacel Ag with vaseline gauze versus 1% silver sulfadiazine cream in toxic epidermal necrolysis.
The purpose of this study was to determine whether using Aquacel Ag (ConvaTec, Skillman, New Jersey) with Vaseline (Unilever, London, England) gauze instead of silver sulfadiazine cream (SSD) as the wound care protocol to treat toxic epidermal necrolysis (TEN) can improve wound healing, pain control, and reduction of labor costs. ⋯ This study showed that Aquacel Ag with Vaseline gauze decreased pain and labor costs but did not shorten wound healing time. Thus, Aquacel Ag with Vaseline gauze can be an efficient method for treating TEN wounds.
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Adv Skin Wound Care · May 2014
Is the 2014 Office of Inspector General Work Plan keeping you up at night?
Wound care providers should do everything possible to prevent becoming a target for OIG investigations, which will surely keep them up at night. The best way to get a good night’s sleep is to follow the most current coding, payment, coverage, and documentation regulations that pertain to your business. Then, consider the focus areas of the annual OIG Work Plan as “ a heads-up.” If you wish to read the entire 2014 OIG Work Plan, you can find it at http://www.oig.hhs.gov.
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Adv Skin Wound Care · Apr 2014
Full-thickness skin wound healing using autologous keratinocytes and dermal fibroblasts with fibrin: bilayered versus single-layered substitute.
Split-skin grafting (SSG) is the gold standard treatment for full-thickness skin defects. For certain patients, however, an extensive skin lesion resulted in inadequacies of the donor site. Tissue engineering offers an alternative approach by using a very small portion of an individual's skin to harvest cells for propagation and biomaterials to support the cells for implantation. ⋯ The results showed that BTES, SLTES-K, and SLTES-F promote wound healing in nonchambered and chambered wounds, and BTES demonstrated the best healing potential. In conclusion, BTES proved to be an effective tissue-engineered construct that can promote the healing of full-thickness skin lesions. With the support of further clinical trials, this procedure could be an alternative to SSG for patients with partial- and full-thickness burns.
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Adv Skin Wound Care · Mar 2014
Innovative use of povidone-iodine to guide burn wound debridement and predict the success of biobrane as a definitive treatment for burns.
The success of Biobrane (Smith & Nephew, St. Petersburg, Florida) dressing in superficial burns depends on wound selection and preparation. ⋯ Next, Biobrane is applied, and adherence is checked after 48 hours. The authors' study showed that remaining brown areas of the wound are predictive of Biobrane nonadherence, which is indicative of deeper burns.
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Adv Skin Wound Care · Mar 2014
Comparative StudyA hydrosurgery system (Versajet) with and without hydrogen peroxide solutions for the debridement of subacute and chronic wounds: a comparative study with hydrodebridement.
The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of hydrosurgery prepared with or without hydrogen peroxide for the management of subacute and chronic wounds. ⋯ Encouraging results were obtained with the use of the hydrosurgery system prepared with hydrogen peroxide for infected subacute and chronic wounds. This method decreased hospital stay and bleeding, thus providing better contact of the skin graft with the wound bed, allowing early rehabilitation. The findings of the authors' study need to be substantiated in large-scale randomized controlled trials.