Ever imagined healing your skin wounds with a gel made from a your own blood? Sounds strange, but a recent research proposed that blood platelets from the patients own blood speeded healing.
Skin injuries treated with this gel cured about 10% more quickly than wounds treated with only an antibiotic ointment. Wounds that ordinarily would heal fully in 28 to 30 days instead healed few days more rapidly when the concentrated topical gel was applied to them.
Though, there was a caution stuck by the researchers that the experiment was on a small scale only – with only eight people examined this way. Four males and four female volunteered to get 10 small wounds, five on each thigh, experimented. The gel was applied to the wounds on one thigh and not on the other. The healing process was tracked for six months, which proved successful.
Yet, they hope that the concept if successful could change the way doctors deal with wounds, from surgical incisions to, potentially, internal injuries. That would mean easy recovery after surgery for the patients and reduced chances of complications. It would particularly be a boost for people suffering from diabetics or chemotherapy patients prone to poor healing.
Dr. David Hom of the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine in Ohio, who led this research time,said
I’m excited about it because it changes our way of thinking about wounds. Instead of passively just watching it heal, we can now actively intervene to possibly speed it up. You’re just taking from the patient. By concentrating a person’s own blood and giving it back to the patient into the patient’s wound, we basically concentrated the growth factors (proteins) which are important in wound healing in attempting to improve their healing.
The next step in this regard will be to put together a larger study to test the concept. It is hoped that the experiment would reap rich benefits.
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Via:Reuters