Mechanical evaluation of topical silicone gel on skin wound healing

Dermatix is a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) registered treatment for hypertrophic scars and keloids. Some studies have evaluated its effects on scars and tried to find out its mechanism of effectiveness. However, there were few papers discussing about the mechanical properties of wounds after treated with Dermatix. Thus, our study aims to conduct tensile test to analyze the condition of skin wound treated with Dermatix and compare the results to the non-treated wounds. We evaluated the wound healing condition at 1, 2, 4 and 6 weeks healing time and introduced recovery index to normalize the different growing condition of each rats. The results showed that during healing time 4~6 weeks, both wounds recovered rapidly. And in all the healing time, Dermatix treated group showed better tensile strength and better recovery index. However, no significant difference was found at all healing time. We guess it is occlusion, hydration and normalization of TEWL effects of Dermatix that help collagen synthesize.