Trevor Levine, centre, with his children Josh, Sara, Avery and Jack

On the Friday of the Victoria Day long weekend two years ago, Trevor Levine developed a fever. Excruciating pain in his right thigh followed soon after.

By the time he went to the emergency room at his local hospital three days later, things had gone from bad to worse.

“I needed a wheelchair to get to the ER, my lips were blue as the nurse was triaging me and my oxygen level was in the low 80’s. I even lost consciousness as I was moved from the wheelchair to the examination table,” he says.

After blood tests, antibiotics, a lumbar puncture and a CT scan on his leg, he was diagnosed with necrotizing fasciitis, a rare condition commonly referred to as flesh-eating disease.

Trevor woke up in the intensive care unit (ICU) two days later to learn that a large amount of dead tissue had been surgically removed from his leg, leaving him with an opening “almost the size of a keyboard” on his inner thigh.

Nevertheless, within a few weeks Trevor seemed to be on the road to recovery, even walking around the unit and starting to go up some stairs.

But then the fever returned. Trevor went into septic shock again and was sent back to the ICU. His wife Carrie, a registered nurse at Sunnybrook, knew that the best place for Trevor was the Ross Tilley Burn Centre at Sunnybrook, and he was transferred there soon after.

“What had been missing from my care was a long-term wound management plan and being in a place with incredibly rigorous infection control practices. Sunnybrook’s Burn Centre has a lot of experience with both,” Trevor says.

Once he arrived at Sunnybrook, he knew he was in good hands. After five more surgeries and several weeks as an in-patient, Trevor’s leg was finally healing well, and he was discharged home.

He became an outpatient at Sunnybrook’s St. John’s Rehab, working on strengthening his body in twice-weekly occupational therapy and physiotherapy sessions. After spending a good chunk of the summer in the hospital, “I could hardly walk four houses down the street,” Trevor says.

Five months after his initial emergency room visit, Trevor returned to work as a risk management and process improvement consultant. He feels very fortunate to have regained full use of his leg.

“I’m lucky that the infection was caught early, and I’m grateful everything turned out the way it did, because it easily could have gone the other way,” he says.

“I think it was a lot harder on my family than it was on me, but I never felt scared because I trusted the process.”

He also can’t say enough about the “fantastic” culture in the Ross Tilley Burn Centre.

“The staff really have an ‘all hands on deck’ mentality. They take their jobs seriously, but they don’t take themselves too seriously, and that made a huge difference in my recovery,” he says.

“It really felt like I was being taken care of by family.”

The post How the Ross Tilley Burn Centre helped this patient recover from necrotizing fasciitis appeared first on Your Health Matters.

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Skin discarded during burn surgery has useable stem cells: Sunnybrook study

November 5, 2018: The Future of Burn Care.

For a long time, burned skin tissue has been considered to be nothing more than medical waste.

Now, Sunnybrook researchers have found in a pre-clinical study that debrided burned skin, which is routinely removed from patients during surgery and discarded,  contains viable, undamaged cells that show characteristics of mesenchymal skin stem cells (MSCs).

These cells can be extracted, characterized, expanded, and incorporated into skin substitutes to promote wound healing.

Why is finding new ways to heal wounds so important?

Worldwide, 11 million people are burned and 265,000 people die from burn injuries every year.

The larger the burn, the less healthy skin remains for skin grafting . More alternative wound coverage materials are needed, because current materials are either ineffective, cause immunologic rejections, take too long to produce sufficient cell numbers or are too expensive.

The study

1. Burned skin tissue debrided during surgery.
2. Tissue added to sterile containers, carefully wrapped and transferred to research lab.
3. Cells extracted and cultured. Later stored in liquid nitrogen.
4. When cells began to grow out from the tissue, the tissue was removed, and adherent cells continued to grow.

5. Applied the cellular coverage material onto excisional wounds. Found that BD-MSCs facilitates healing and decreases healing time

Burn-derived stem cells are a promising new source of skin stem cells for regenerative medicine and burn-wound management.

Without being limited by the common obstacles of stem cell therapies and its availability, this method could revolutionize the way we treat burn patients, and potentially patients with complex wounds.

Authors: Saeid Amini-Nik, M.D., Ph.D.; Reinhard Dolp; Gertraud Eylert,; Andrea K Datu; Alexandra Parousis; Camille Blakeley; Marc G Jeschke

Published in EBioMedicine Journal on November 5, 2018.

Funding: Canadian Institutes of Health Research # 123336; CFI Leader’s Opportunity Fund: Project # 25407; National Institutes of Health 2R01GM087285-05A1; EMHSeed: Fund: 500463; A generous donation from Toronto Hydro; Integra©Life Science Company provided the meshed bilayer Integra© for porcine experiments

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More on this topic

Engineering a handheld 3-D skin printer to heal burn wounds

The post Skin discarded during burn surgery has useable stem cells: study appeared first on Your Health Matters.