Development of PEC-clay nanocomposite for hemorrhage
control

Abstract

External wounds such as cuts, abrasions, lacerations and in cases deep wounds like gunshot wound or even burns are included in common causes of death as they lead to heavy blood loss from human body. Prevention for these issues are use of hemostatic agent in the preliminary stage thereby impeding blood loss for 30 minutes to 1 hour at least and alleviate hypovolemic shock induced deaths in humans. Numerous wound dressing materials have been developed in last few decades which use simple, readily available biomaterials to prepare hemostatic agents either in the form of powder, or gauge or sponge material or beads etc. Almost all commercially available agents are found to have excellent desired characteristics as a wound dressing even though almost each of them lack some major characteristics. For a dressing to be ideal it should be highly hemocompatible, it should have antimicrobial properties, it should be hydrophilic, should have moisture content, should be able to remove easily, should be flexible to use in all types of wounds, not just superficial, flat wounds and lastly it should absorb all the exudates.
Some of the commercially available wound dressing agents are QuickClot, Hemcon Chitogauge, Cel-X etc. QuickClot (Z-Medica) is composed of mineral zeolite powder with a 3D honeycomb structure that allows it to sift molecules by size. When comes in contact with blood, it absorbs water molecules increasing the clotting factors and cell concentrations at the wound. This readily forms clot at the wounded site. However QuickClot was found to have a severe side effect. It appeared to be exothermic and caused local tissue burn at the wounded site. Also use of granular form QuickClot was difficult. Once clot is formed, the powder could only be extracted by surgery. Hemcon, made up of chitosan is a stiff dressing and thus is limited only to superficial wounds. For deep wounds more advanced ChitoFlex and ChitoGauge are used.