Safety And Efficacy Study Of Cold Atmospheric Plasma Treatment Of Acute Wounds

Background: Acute wounds are very common in dermatology clinics,such as those formed by trauma,burns,frostbite,and common medical operations in dermatology(e.g.,laser,freezing,or surgery).Most acute wounds can heal quickly with early and aggressive interventions,but some wounds have delayed healing due to local ischemia or wound infection,especially the occurrence of complicated infections;resulting in the gradual transformation of acute wounds into chronic wounds and prolonging the healing time.There are many ways to treat wounds in modern medicine,including debridement,sterilants,wound dressings,negative pressure therapy,and new nanomaterials.However,repetitive medical procedures,unavoidable pain during treatment,and high expenses lead to low patient compliance with treatment.There is still a huge resistance to the wound healing process,and there is an urgent need to introduce new alternative treatment modalities.According to domestic and foreign scholars,Cold Atmospheric Plasma(CAP)has potential applications in accelerating wound repair.Method: Ordinary air was used as the gas source to generate CAP using the ST-P101 plasma skin treatment instrument produced by Hefei Zhongke Ion Medical Technology Co.Safety experiments: 24 SD rats were divided into two groups,and two types of high and low intensity CAP were used to irradiate the back skin of rats,and the irradiation time was set to 30 min,20 min,10 min and 5 min,and 3 rats were repeated in each group to observe whether there was local skin erythema and edema,and take the irradiated skin for histomorphological examination;Effectiveness experiments:(1)SD rats were used to establish a scalding model.The left trauma was the control group,which received saline treatment,and the right trauma was the treatment group,which received CAP treatment;according to the intensity of CAP treatment,it was divided into low-intensity CAP treatment group and high-intensity CAP treatment group;on the 5th,10 th,15th and 20 th days of treatment,images of the trauma on the back of the rats were taken,the area of the trauma was counted,and the healing rate of the trauma was calculated.(2)Five patients with acute wounds(one post-laser wounds,two frozen wounds,and two surgical wounds)were selected from the dermatology outpatient clinic,and the patients responded poorly to conventional treatment modalities and were treated with CAP with informed consent to observe wound healing.Results: In the safety experiments,erythema,edema or both appeared on the skin of the experimental site after 30 min of high-intensity CAP irradiation on the normal skin of rats;after 20 min of high-intensity CAP irradiation on the normal skin of rats,slight erythema appeared on the skin of the experimental site of one rat;after 5 min or 10 min of high-intensity CAP irradiation on the normal skin of rats,no significant irritation was observed on the skin of all experimental sites;In contrast,no local erythema or edema was observed after 30 min of low-intensity CAP irradiation on normal skin of rats.The histomorphological results showed that after 20 or 30 min of high-intensity CAP treatment,the skin of rats exposed to CAP showed slight keratinization and edema compared with normal skin,while there was no significant difference in inflammatory cells.In the validity experiment,the wound healing rate of rat was counted on the 5th,10 th,15th,and 20 th days of treatment,and it was found that the wound healing rate was faster in the CAP-treated group than the control group,and the difference in wound healing was statistically significant(p<0.05);in the skin histomorphology,it was observed that epithelial cells,blood vessels,and skin appendages occurred earlier in the CAP-treated group than the control group,and the CAP-treated group had a re-epithelialization process was more rapid in the CAP-treated group.In the treatment of clinical acute wounds using CAP,five clinical acute wounds were treated with CAP,and all wounds were largely healed after 8 to 22 CAP treatments.All patients treated had no pain or tolerable pain during the treatment period.No skin irritation such as erythema or edema was observed during treatment in all patients.Conclusion: Our study shows that CAP is safe and effective for the treatment of acute trauma;CAP has a promising application as a new trauma treatment modality.