Characteristics and aetiology of low-temperature burns in Beijing of China
A burn is an injury to the skin or other organic tissue caused primarily by excessive heat, and sometimes by radiation, radioactivity, electricity, friction or chemicals.1 Thermal burns are usually caused by flame, steam, hot liquids and hot surfaces, and burn degree depends on the temperature of the heat source and the time length of the skin's contact with the source. High temperature heat sources such as flames or boiling water can cause deep burns within seconds. When the heat source has a milder temperature (44–51°C), it would take hours to cause thermal burns. Burns resulted by prolonged contact with such kinds of heat sources are known as low-temperature burns in clinical settings and their degree has been found to be positively correlated with the length of contact time.To get more news about
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In the early stage of low-temperature burns, the depth of the wound would be superficial, and blisters would form between the epidermis and dermis. However, if the heat sources were not removed in time, the deeper tissue would get burned under the continuous heating and the formed blisters would continue to exist. Therefore, the depth of deep low-temperature burns can be easily misdiagnosed and the injury ignored due to the small wound size and mild pain, resulting in improper post-injury treatment, delayed wound healing, and compromised life quality subsequently. This study analysed the aetiology and wound characteristics of low-temperature burns in 206 patients admitted to our burn center during the past 4 years to support the formulation of more targeted and effective prevention and treatment strategies.
2 METHODS
Ethics approval
This retrospective study was approved by the Ethics Committee of Chinese PLA General Hospital. Informed consent was not required in this study.
Data extraction
The clinical data of 206 hospitalised patients with low-temperature burns from January 1, 2017 to October 31, 2021 were collected. The data including age, gender, cause, burn site, burn size and depth, date of burn injury, time from injury to admission, other wound characteristics, treatment measures, wound healing time, and length of hospital stay were analysed.
Statistical analysis
The data were recorded using Microsoft Excel 365 (USA, Microsoft), and data analyses were conducted using SPSS 26.0 (USA, IBM analytics) and GraphPad Prism 6 (USA, GraphPad Software Inc.). Categorical variables were presented as frequencies and percentages (%), and continuous variables were presented as mean ± SD. Chi-square test, Fisher's exact test, and Bonferroni correction were used to analyse categorical variables. P < .05 was considered statistically significant.
3 RESULTS
General characteristics
The number of hospitalised patients with low-temperature burns accounted for 0.43% (206/47920) of the total patients admitted to the hospital in the same period. The number of low-temperature burn cases was 35–49 (41 ± 4.5) per year, without obvious fluctuations.
Among all the low-temperature burn cases, female patients accounted for 60.19% (124/206) and most of the cases occurred at home, accounting for 83.98% (173/206). All patients aged 3 months to 88 years (mean age: 50.39 ± 19.20 years). The results were shown in Table 1.
