Burn injuries to the anterior chest wall in the young woman may cause disfiguration or lack of development of the breasts during puberty. Often the patients are referred after puberty with an apparent lack of breast development due to firm postburn scar tissue constricting the anterior chest wall. We report a case where a young female with a postburn disfiguration and apparent diminished breast...

BACKGROUND We conducted an experimental study to compare the effect of massage using topical agents (Kelo-cote or Contractubex) on scar formation by massaging the healed burn wound on the dorsal area of Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats. METHODS Four areas of second degree contact burn were made on the dorsal area of each of 15 SD rats, using a soldering iron 15 mm in diameter. After gross epitheliali...

The nose is the central part of the face, and constitutes the most prominent projection in facial geometry. This report presents five cases that sustained a chemical burn injury with associated facial mutilation resulting from contact with strong acids. The chemical burn affected the nasal architecture after inflicting a burn injury to the face. Applying bone deriving from a split skull procedu...

objective (s): scar formation in injured peripheral nerve bed causes several consequences which impede the process of nerve regeneration. several animal models are used for scar induction in preclinical studies which target prevention and/or suppression of perineural scar. this study evaluates the translational capacity of four of physical injury models to induce scar formation around the sciat...

Post-burn scar contracture associated with deep second-degree or higher burns in the joint area can lead to immobility and may cause chronic ulcers, substantially impacting patients’ quality of life. Surgical intervention is necessary, local flaps skin grafts being first option. In extreme cases, free flap transfer be required address large defects that occur after release. This study presents ...

Burn scars are the result of wound healing following a partial-thickness or full-thickness thermal injury. Thermal injury can frequently result in extensive scarring, which may have profound psychologic impact on the victim, serving as a visible and palpable reminder of a traumatic event. Standard treatments for scars include the use of skin grafts, intralesional steroid injections, and pulsed-...

OBJECTIVE Scar contracture of the neck after a burn-injury can cause both functional and aesthetic problems, and still presents a challenge for plastic surgeons. The anatomic area and adjacent structures such as the lower lip, trachea and neuro-vascular structures which are affected by the scar make treatment diffucult. Scarring and contracture of the neck region may severely limit function, ca...

Tropoelastin (TE), the soluble precursor of insoluble elastin fibers, is produced in minimal amounts in adults. Burn injuries result in inflexible collagen-rich scars because of lack of elastin fiber formation. We studied the feasibility of using recombinant human tropoelastin to enable elastin fiber production in burn and surgical scars to improve skin flexibility. In a swine hypertrophic burn...

Spinal cord injury is followed by glial scar formation, which has positive and negative effects on recovery from the lesion. More than half of the astrocytes in the glial scar are generated by ependymal cells, the neural stem cells in the spinal cord. We recently demonstrated that the neural stem cell-derived scar component has several beneficial functions, including restricting tissue damage a...

INTRODUCTION Reliable characterization of a hypertrophic scar (HTS) is integral to epidemiologic studies designed to identify clinical and genetic risk factors for HTS. The Vancouver Scar Scale (VSS) has been widely used for this purpose; however, no publication has defined what score on this scale corresponds to a clinical diagnosis of HTS. METHODS In a survey of 1000 burn care providers, we...