Reduced Time to Skin Grafting in Chronic Wounds Using an Esterified Hyaluronic Acid Matrix and Negative Pressure Wound Therapy

Nurse practitioner Tracy Robertson shares background on her case series, Reduced Time to Skin Grafting in Chronic Wounds Using an Esterified Hyaluronic Acid Matrix and Negative Pressure Wound Therapy. Read the full article here.
 

Transcript:

My name is Tracy Robertson. I am a family nurse practitioner certified in wound care, and I am currently affiliated with Advanced Total Wound Care. It's my own private practice. But this study, however, was done with McLaren Bay Region at the time when I was over there at that wound clinic where this study was actually done.

With this case series, we were looking at the application of esterified hyaluronic acid with the application of negative pressure versus just applying negative pressure to the wound itself. And what we had found was actually that using the hyaluronic acid, that it would actually able the wound itself to become ready for split thickness skin grafting at a much faster rate than what it did with just negative pressure by itself.

As I had continued using the hyaluronic acid, I had noticed... And I was using it more so over bone tendon hardware, and so as most of you know, it's difficult to get this area to granulate. So when I was using this product with the negative pressure, I was actually seeing an increased rate of granulation over bone tendon and hardware, which is great as we're trying to close these wounds. So that's how this all started. As we were seeing great results, especially when we added that with negative pressure in seeing the increased granulation over these areas.

Our results, it was surprising because yes, the timeframe for split thickness skin grafting were close. But if you look at the initial wound area in group one versus group two, group one being that we actually applied the esterified hyaluronic acid with the negative pressure, the square centimeters of those wounds were actually larger than in group two. So even though the results were close as far as being able to apply the split thickness skin grafting, you have to look at the overall size of the wounds that we were actually treating. So we were actually able to treat these larger wounds much more quickly than with just applying negative pressure to the wound itself.

I think research is actually really important with open wounds, especially when you have the open hardware, bone and tendon because a lot of these patients are diabetic, so we are trying to granulate, prep these wound beds for split thickness skin grafting or for using another product in order to get these wounds or ulcers closed as fast as we can, just to help prevent the infection rate because the longer a wound is open, we know that there's an increased rate of infection. So it is important that research continues to find products that will allow us to granulate and prep the wound bed itself to do a split thickness skin grafting or some other type of product that we can to close these wounds as fast as we can.