Burn injury: review of pathophysiology and therapeutic modalities in major burns.

Despite a considerable decrease in their incidence worldwide, burn injuries remain one of the commonest forms of trauma and account for a weighty proportion of trauma cases in health-care emergencies around the globe. Although the latest data reveal a substantial decline in burn-related mortality and hospital admissions in the US over the past three decades, severe thermal injuries continue to trigger devastating morbidity and significant mortality while their management remains a dynamic challenge for the entire medical and paramedical community. Concrete evidence continues to be established regarding burn-associated pathophysiologic responses, and their destructive sequelae and deleterious effects in survivors at cellular, systemic as well as socio-economic level.

Microsurgery in the burn population - a review of the literature.

The management of patients suffering from burn injury poses unique challenges for the reconstructive surgeon, both in the acute and delayed settings. Once resuscitative measures are optimized and hemodynamic stability is achieved, early burn debridement and coverage is performed. Traditionally, this consists of excision of devitalized tissue and subsequent coverage using split thickness skin grafts.

The cleft sternum: a possible role for pliable prosthetic reconstruction.

Background: Faced with our intraoperative inability to primarily close a very wide isolated cleft sternum of a pediatric patient without causing cardiovascular decompensation, we describe our use of a synthetic material for partial approximation allowing muscular coverage.

Method: We report an infant who was born with an isolated large complete sternal cleft where a trial of primary surgical repair had to be abandoned because of cardiovascular compromise. A similar difficulty was encountered in approximating the origins of both pectoralis major muscle flaps at the midline.

Numerous recurrent trichilemmal cysts of the scalp: differential diagnosis and surgical management.

Trichilemmal cysts are common benign soft tissue tumors that occur in hairy areas, especially the scalp, where they present themselves as solitary masses that could be easily treated by surgical excision followed by pathologic identification. It is unusual to find these benign masses in very large numbers in 1 scalp. In the current article, we describe a 43-year-old woman who presented with 51 scalp masses, some of which recurred after repetitive excisions somewhere else by different surgeons under local anesthesia.

Fibro-osseous pseudotumor of the thenar eminence: a rare aggressive but benign tumor.

Fibro-osseous pseudotumor is a rare benign lesion that is characterized by fibroblastic proliferation with foci of osseous differentiation. The tumor commonly involves the digits and is usually mistaken for malignancy because of its aggressive nature thus resulting in surgical over treatment. We report a patient with fibro-osseous pseudotumor that involved the thenar eminence and was managed successfully by local resection from the surrounding structures with no residual loss of function.