A review on polymeric hydrogel membranes for wound dressing applications: PVA-based hydrogel dressings

This review presents the past and current efforts with a brief description on the featured properties of hydrogel membranes fabricated from biopolymers and synthetic ones for wound dressing applications. Many endeavors have been exerted during past ten years for developing new artificial polymeric membranes, which fulfill the demanded conditions for the treatment of skin wounds. This review mainly focuses on representing specifications of ideal polymeric wound dressing membranes, such as crosslinked hydrogels compatible with wound dressing purposes. But as the hydrogels with single component have low mechanical strength, recent trends have offered composite or hybrid hydrogel membranes to achieve the typical wound dressing requirements. (C) 2017 Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Cairo University.This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license