Extended Wear Transforming Powder Dressing for Hard-to-Heal Wounds

Dr. Matthias Augustin presents an overview of his poster, “Retrospective Descriptive Analysis of Transforming Powder Dressing in 70 Patients with Hard-To-Heal Wounds,” presented at SAWC Fall 2023 in Las Vegas, NV.

Transcript

Matthias Augustin, MD

Hello, dear colleagues. I'm professor Matthias Augustin, a dermatologist and chair at the University Medical Center of Hamburg. I'm also the head of the comprehensive wound center, which includes the treatment of the large variety of chronic wounds.

I'm going to tell you about a retrospective descriptive analysis that we performed on a powder dressing that has very special properties. It's the Altrazeal transforming power dressings, which we applied to 70 patients with very hard to heal wounds, exactly those wounds that have never shown a tendency of healing in the previous 12 months or longer. And these wounds were consecutively treated in our wound patient clinic. Though the data analysis is retrospective on because we have all the data on our electronic health record, all patients were having different kind of underlying pathology, venous ulcers, atypical, other wounds, inflammatory wounds or immune wounds, those having had surgery and didn't heal, diabetic foot ulcers, arterial ulcers, ischemic ulcers, and others.

So, it was a mix of wounds as we see it in the real world, and all patients were treated with the transforming powder dressing, which I will call TPD now. And it was applied post-wound cleansing or debridement, so the wounds were already debrided, but then it was used as the primary dressing followed by a non-occlusive secondary dressing.

And the wound assessments were analyzed 1 week post TPD application, then 4 weeks. And after this, 12 week intervals, and besides of the wound size, the demographics, the incidence of the wound healing, and achievement of clinician treatment goals were recorded along the trajectory of the wound. And, finally, the data were collated and analyzed for the outcomes I just mentioned in a retrospective way.

So, the 70 patients included 41% male, 52% female. The mean age, 65 years, which is quite young for the vascular ulcer spectrum. It also included, as I said, other origins, like immunological wounds. Wound duration on average, 19.1 months. Wound area mean size, 16.5 square centimeters, which is quite large. And, if it comes to the wear time of the TPD, this was quite long where the one of the properties is that it can be staying on the wound for several days or even weeks. And 66% have a wearing time without dressing change of 30 days or more.

There were no unanticipated adverse events related to the TPD, so the tolerability was very good. Even there were many patients who reported an improvement in the pain sensation they had. When it comes to the wound healing outcomes, 53% of the wounds healed as compared to 8%, which we got from the European wound registry, which includes about 5,000 patients, and they were matched and directly compared. So, again, 53% of healing compared to 8%. And the treatment goals that were defined prior to the treatment were achieved in 71% of the patients.

And some treatment was discontinued due to various reasons: [inaudible], death, some related most not related to the TPD. And, so if it comes to the wound area surface reduction, there was about 22% reduction after 1 week, 45 after 4 weeks on average and 61% after 12 to 14 weeks. And this it already shows that compared to the standard of care that we had previously seen in this historical comparison group, the TPD treated wounds showed much better improvement in terms of wound healing, in terms of other properties of the wound in terms of the patient perception, quality of life, and also the pain levels. So, as a conclusion, we observed a well-tolerated and markedly effective device, the TPD. And now in the so consecutive times since we did this analysis, we have turned to the use of TPD, of Altrazeal, in most wounds, which shows such a prolonged healing. And the properties, again, as a summary, it's not just a better healing rate, but also the control of infection, the long period between the dressings changes. So, there is less changes, better use of materials, less need for nursing work on the wound, and finally better quality of life for the patients.

So, finally, like always, there's need for further research where one truly will focus on the question: how do the different wound entities behave using the treatment? And second, also, of course, there's need in the long run to have prospective, comparative treatment studies so that we can better analyze and confirm the good results that we got from this retrospective, largely registry-like study. And with this, I thank you very much for your attention.