A randomized comparison study of Aquacel Ag and Alginate Silver as skin graft donor site dressings

Objective: This study was conducted to compare pain, healing time, infection rate, and cosmetic outcome between Aquacel Ag (convatec) and Alginate Silver (coloplast) as donor site dressings. Materials and Methods: We conducted a prospective randomized controlled trial of donor site dressings, comparing Aquacel Ag with Alginate Silver. Patients were randomly allocated to donor site dressing with one of these materials. Outcome measures included pain scores at rest and during dressing changes, time to re-epithelialization, cosmetic outcome and infection rate. Results were assessed for significance using the independent t-test (non-parametric data) and the chi-square test (parametric data). Results: A total of 20 subjects were enrolled in this study. Subjects included in both groups were comparable with no significant differences in demographic data of age, gender, location of burn and type of burns (P > 0.05 evaluated by paired t-test) between both group. The pain scores were found to be higher in Aquacel Ag group than in Alginate Silver group. Time to re-epithelialization was longer in Aquacel Ag group than in Alginate Silver group. There were no significant differences between the two treatment groups with respect to cosmetic outcome and infection rate. Conclusions: Based on these results, we find that Alginate Silver is better than Aquacel Ag to cover the skin graft donor site. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd and ISBI. All rights reserved.