Epidermal wound healing in severe sepsis and septic shock in humans.docVIP

Available online /content/13/3/R100 Research Open Access Vol 13 No 3 Epidermal wound healing in severe sepsis and septic shock in humans Marjo Koskela1,2,3*, Fiia G?ddn?s1,2,3*, Tero I Ala-Kokko1,2,3, Jouko J Laurila1,2,3, Juha Saarnio1,2,3, Aarne Oikarinen1,2,3 and Vesa Koivukangas1,2,3 1Department of Anesthesiology, Division of Intensive Care Medicine, Oulu University Hospital, Kajaanintie 50, BOX 21, 90029 OUH, Finland 2Department of Surgery, Oulu University Hospital, Kajaanintie 50, Oulu, BOX 21, 90029 OUH, Finland 3Department of Dermatology, Oulu University Hospital, Kajaanintie 50, Oulu, BOX 21, 90029 OUH, Finland * Contributed equally Corresponding author: Vesa Koivukangas, vesa.koivukangas@ppshp.fi Received: 4 Dec 2008 Revisions requested: 20 Jan 2009 Revisions received: 17 Feb 2009 Accepted: 24 Jun 2009 Published: 24 Jun 2009 Critical Care 2009, 13:R100 (doi:10.1186/cc7932) This article is online at: /content/13/3/R100 ? 2009 Koskela et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Introduction The effect of sepsis on epidermal wound healing has not been previously studied. It was hypothesised that epidermal wound healing is disturbed in severe sepsis. admission was 25 (SD 8). The two most common causes of infections were peritonitis and pneumonia. Sixty-six percent of the patients developed multiple organ failure. The decrease in water evaporation from the wound during the first four days was lower in septic patients than in the control subjects (56 g/m2 per Methods Blister wounds were induced in 35 patients with severe sepsis and in 15 healthy controls. The healing of the wounds was followed up by measuring transepidermal water loss and blood flow in the wound, refle