Resuscitation from Burn Shock: Back to the Future

Special Article - Burns

Austin J Emergency & Crit Care Med. 2015; 2(6): 1037.

Resuscitation from Burn Shock: Back to the Future

Jones LM*, Coffey RA and Bailey JK

Department of Surgery, Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, USA

*Corresponding author: Jones LM, Department of Surgery, The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, 410 W. 10th Avenue, N744 Doan Hall, Columbus, OH 43210, USA

Received: May 13, 2015; Accepted: November 02, 2015; Published: November 04, 2015

Abstract

Numerous and, at times, widely different burn resuscitation formulae have been proposed over the past 70 years. This brief historical review of those formulae provides an understanding of how they were arrived at and how each was used as a foundation for the subsequent formulae. A glimpse into the future ends the article by concluding that fluids alone do not cure burn shock and cites early publications with a call to “shift the focus of burn resuscitation away from fluid intake to adequate endpoint monitoring, edema control and adjuvant therapies”.

Keywords: Resuscitation formula; Historical review; Fluids

Introduction

“The local treatment of burns is a subject on which many books have been written and perhaps more numerous remedies recommended than in any branch of surgery. The success which is said to have attended very different, and even opposite modes of treatment, shows that the authors must either be misrepresenting the facts or speaking about different matters” [1].

Those words apply as well today as when they were written in 1881. Perhaps no area of burn treatment illustrates this better than the various formulae that have been proposed for burn shock resuscitation.

The fluid shift characteristic of all burn injuries was the focus of one of the first papers published on the subject, The Significance of Anhydremia in Extensive Superficial Burns [2] by Frank P. Underhill, Ph. D. Doctor Underhill was the Chairman of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the Yale School of Medicine from 1921 to 1932. The paper, based on Dr. Underhill’s observations of patients following the Rialto Theater fire in 1921, recommended the early treatment of burned patients to consist of 1) control of pain by morphine and atropine, 2) treatment of shock through the application of heat and putting the patient to bed without removing the clothing, 3) intravenous infusion of saline at 25cc per minute supplemented by the drinking of water, hypodermoclysis and proctoclysis, and 4) cleansing and dressing the burned surface with trinitrophenol, tannic acid, open air exposure or radiant and ultraviolet light therapy. He cautioned that “the systemic treatment in the early stage is of much greater significance than the treatment of the injured surface.”

Further interest in burn shock resuscitation was piqued following the disastrous fire at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Boston on November 28, 1942. Earlier that same year at the meeting of the National Research Council, Dr. Henry N. Harkins proposed, for the first time, that burn resuscitation be based on the amount of body surface area burned [3]. His formula that administered plasma and saline (Table 1) appeared in the U.S. Military Surgical Manuals the following year [4].