Burn injury in Mottahari Burn Center in Tehran, Iran

DEAR EDITOR Burn is one of the devastating conditions in emergency medicine resulting into physical and psychological disabilities.1 During pregnancy, it has an increasing trend for mortality and morbidity of both mother and infant.2 So practical activities to decrease its physical and emotional complications seem mandatory.2 For survivors, the most persisting problem is scarring while healing is a complex process including inflammation, granulation, and remodeling of the tissue.3 Silver sulfadiazine was reported as the gold standard in topical burn therapy with antibacterial properties.4 There may be the resistance of several bacteria to silver sulfadiazine. So, there is a need for new agents for treatment of burn wounds with less adverse effects and more efficacy.4 The medicinal herbals were extensively used in wound healing of burn injuries.5-9 Elderly patients are more at risk of burn, due to physiological limitations caused by aging, and the immune system problems.10 Most of these patients usually have a history of diseases such as cardiovascular, pulmonary, renal and that is because they are subjecting at high risk of burn side effect like deformity, septic shock and reducing the healing time too.10 The enrolled population were of both elderly and non-elderly patients, of both male and female genders referring to Motahari Burn center in Tehran, Iran. The questionnaires was completed by burn specialist. The reliability was confirmed by Cronbach’s alpha of 84.0 and statistically analyzed. As Table 1 shows, the 60-70 and 12-30 years old patients were the most susceptible age groups and were mostly male. The majority of elderlies lived in Tehran and in non-elderly from other cities. Most of patients in elderly group were illiterate and married. They were mostly unemployed and suffered from poor economic situation. Most of elderly patients had no history of diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, hyperlipidemia, asthma, some degrees of visual problem and hearing losses. While in the non-elderly group, most of patients did not have any history of those diseases except for hypertension, diabetes and mental illnesses. As Table 1 demonstrates, most burn time in elderly patients were in the evening and in non-elderly patients in the morning and noon time. The burn season in both elderly patients and nonelderly patients was in the winter and then in the fall for both groups. For most of burn patients, the waiting time for help was about an hour. In the elderly patients, hot liquids and gas were the Letter to Editor