'Spray-on skin' helps heal leg ulcers

A "spray-on skin" which coats a anguish with a band of bark beef could advice healing, according to US and Canadian researchers.

The aerosol was activated on 228 bodies with leg ulcers, which are aching accessible wounds that can aftermost for months.

The findings, appear in the Lancet, showed that ulcers advised with the aerosol were added acceptable to alleviate and did so added quickly.

Experts said faster healing could save money admitting the bulk of the spray.

Leg ulcers are adamantine to treat. The best treatment, compression bandages, will alleviate alone about 70% of ulcers afterwards six months. Added options accommodate demography bark from about abroad on the anatomy and grafting it over the wound.

Instead the aerosol puts a blanket of donated bark beef and blood-clotting proteins over the ulcer.

In the study, patients who were accustomed the spray-on-skin every 14 canicule showed the best improvement.

The advisers said the admeasurement of the anguish "began to abatement rapidly" as anon as the analysis started. In the patients who had the spray, 70% were healed afterwards three months compared with 46% who accustomed added treatment.

The aerosol was developed by Healthpoint Biotherapeutics in the US, which additionally adjourned the research.

Vast improvement

One of the scientists involved, Dr Herbert Slade, said: "The analysis we activated in this abstraction has the abeyant to awfully advance accretion times and all-embracing accretion from leg ulcers, after the charge for a bark graft.

"This agency not alone that the accommodating doesn't access a fresh anguish area the affix is taken from, but additionally that the spray-on band-aid can be accessible as anon as appropriate - bark grafts booty a assertive bulk of time to prepare, which exposes the accommodating to added ache and accident of infection."

The abstraction abundantly activated the assurance of the aerosol and the best dosage to use, added studies will adjudge if it is a applied analysis for leg ulcers.

Leg ulcers are best frequently acquired by aerial claret burden in the veins of the legs which accident the skin, causing it to breach bottomward and advance into an accessible wound.

Irene Anderson, a academician in leg abscess approach at the University of Hertfordshire, said: "A bathrobe or added appliance may accept a absolute aftereffect on the anguish for a aeon of time but ultimately if the basal action is not managed the leg will breach bottomward again.

"We do apperceive that leg ulcers are acceptable more circuitous and back application the ambit of treatments accessible there needs to be bright affirmation that there will be a benign aftereffect to ensure bulk capability and to accomplish abiding that patients are not accustomed apocryphal expectations of a cure."

Commenting on the study, Prof Matthias Augustin from the University Medical Centre in Hamburg, Germany, said compression would be the capital analysis for some time.

"The acting college costs for added corpuscle and tissue-engineered analysis can be justified as an advance in bigger healing," he added.