Wound healing
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BOOK REVIEW
Wound Healing Methods and Protocols Edited by Luisa A. DiPietro and Aime L. Burns Humana Press (2003), pp. 467, hardback ISBN 0-89603-999-4 The editors, Luisa A. DiPietro and Aime L. Burns, both from the Department of Surgery of the Loyola University Maywood, IL, present a thorough overview on all aspects of the healing of skin wounds. This book provides a cross-section of practical techniques evaluating the pathophysiology of wound healing as well as of the theoretical background of the subject. Seventy-eight authors from the United States, Germany, Finland, Japan, Denmark, and Switzerland provide a thorough look on animal (in vivo) and in vitro models of wound healing. Because the field of wound healing is evolving rapidly and to date many potential markers may serve for forensic purposes with the aim to determine the age of wounds inflicted antemortem or to decide whether a wound was inflicted after death, this book can be recommended to both the forensic practitioner dealing with respective cases and the forensic scientist working in the field of wound age determination. Of special interest are the chapters Wound Repair in the Aging by Reed et al., Specimen Collection and Analysis: Burn Wounds by Kowal-Vern and Latenser, and Methods for Detection and Quantitation of Leukocytes During Wound Healing by Drugea and Burns. The chapter by Reed et al. is highly interesting to the forensic pathologist and medical examiner, respectively, because a clear distinction between the pathophysiology of wound healing in younger individuals and in the aging skin has not yet been made available to a broader readership of the forensic community. An altered wound healing with age may
have medico-legal significance when using the so far established histological, histochemical, and immunohistochemical markers (most such studies involve individuals with a mean age between 30 and 50 yr) to track down the most probable chronological age of a skin wounds in question with the objective, e.g., to exclude a potential perpetrator who has an alibi for a certain time span or to quantify the survival time of an injured person in order to draw conclusions toward this individual’s capacity to act after sustaining the injuries. In their chapter, Kowal-Vern and Latenser provide examples of where and how to obtain appropriate human burn skin samples and which immunohistochemical methods offer a good source of information about cellular infiltrates (which, conversely, the forensic investigator can use to conclude on the age of a respective burn wound and, hopefully, all associated implications a specific case may have). In their chapter Drugea and Burns point toward quantitation of cell numbers at sites of injury by immunohistochemistry. A large number of figures, some of the histological photographs in color, as well a great source of references and a well-prepared index makes this book a significant contribution to the literature of wound healing.
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Reviewed by Michael Tsokos, MD Institute of Legal Medicine, University of Hamburg,
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