Vitality News Health Articles

Wound Healing Process

December 29th, 2009

In people and domestic pets, scarring left after a trauma, surgery, burn or sports injury is a major medical problem, usually resulting in adverse aesthetics, loss of function, restriction of tissue elasticity and/or growth and negative psychological effects.

Current treatments are empirical, unreliable and unpredictable: there are no prescription drugs for the avoidance or treatment of dermal scarring. Skin wounds on early mammalian embryos cure perfectly with no scars whereas wounds in adult mammals scar.

Specialists are researching the cellular and molecular differences between scar-free healing in embryonic and adult wounds. Important differences include the inflammatory reaction, which in embryonic wounds consists of lower quantities of less differentiated inflammatory cells. This, together with augmented levels of morphogenetic molecules implicated in skin growth and morphogenesis, means that the growth factor profile in a healing embryonic injury is very different from that in an adult injury.

These experiments result in scar-free injury healing in adults. Such studies have allowed the identification of therapeutic targets; an adequate treatment clearly improves or completely avoids scarring during adult injury healing in experimental animals. Some of these new medications have successfully completed safety tests and others. This has permitted them to enter human clinical trials with approval from the appropriate regulatory authorities. Based on favorable results attained from these experiments lead medications have now entered human patient-based tests e.g. in skin graft donor sites.

The hypothesis is that evolutionary factors have been exerted on medium sized, widespread, dirty wounds with considerable tissue destruction e.g. bites, bruises and contusions. Modern wounds (e.g. produced by trauma or surgery) caused by sharp instruments and healing in a clean or sterile environment with close tissue apposition are recent occurrences, not previously found in Nature and to which the evolutionary selected wound healing responses are somewhat useless. It has been shown that both healing with scarring and regeneration can occur within the same animal, including man, and indeed within the same tissue, thereby suggesting that they share similar mechanisms and regulators.

Consequently, by subtly altering the ratio of growth factors present during adult wound healing, we can induce adult wounds to heal perfectly with no scars, with accelerated healing and without negative effects, e.g. on wound strength or wound infection rates. This means that scarring may no longer be an inevitable sequel of modem injury or surgery and that a completely new pharmaceutical approach to the avoidance of human scarring is now possible. Not only skin suffers from scarring; they can appear in many other tissues as well.

Thus scar-improving drugs could have widespread benefits and prevent complications in several tissues, e.g. prevention of blindness after scarring due to eye damage, facilitation of neuronal reconnections in the central and peripheral nervous system by the elimination of glial scarring, recovery of normal gut and reproductive function by preventing strictures and adhesions after damage to the gastrointestinal or reproductive systems, and restoration of locomotor function by preventing scarring in tendons and ligaments.

Scars caused by injuries, burns or surgeries can now be quickly faded using a natural skin care solution with an exclusive formulation that rejuvenates injured cells.

- Valerie Garnier

Posted in Health, Beauty |

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Wound Healing Process