BACKGROUND:The chronic wounds, also cal ed non-heading wounds, can seriously affect the quality of life of patients and has brought heavy burden to patients, as wel as health care professionals. celltherapy is a new method for promoting wound healing and plays an important role in the repair of chronic wounds.
OBJECTIVE:To summarize the progress of researches on the chronic wound healing mechanism and celltherapy, and to provide evidences for the clinical management of chronic wounds and relative basic researches.
METHODS:A computer search of CNKI database from 2005 to 2012, PubMed database from 1995 to 2012 and Foreign Medical Journal Ful-Text Service database from 2000 to 2012 was performed using“non-healing wounds, diabetic foot ulcer, wound healing, celltherapy”in Chinese and English as the key words to retrieve articles about chronic wound healing mechanism and the application of celltherapy. Total y, 42 articles meeting the inclusive criteria were included in result analysis.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSION:The wound healing is a complex biological process, involving multiple celltypes, extracellular matrix and cytokine factors. The delayed healing of refractory wound seriously affects the quality of life of patients and has brought heavy economic burden to patients. At present, many methods have been employed to promote wound repair, such as local hyperbaric oxygen therapy, surgical treatment, herbal Chinese medicine, application of various growth factors, celltherapy and gene therapy. celltherapy is noninvasive and those delivered cells can adapt to their environment, are able to release growth factors and cytokines, and more importantly, are able to deliver the growth factors for the wound healing process due to cellsignaling capabilities. Currently, cells used for the treatment of chronic wound cells mainly include bone marrow stem cells, bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells, cord blood stem cells, peripheral blood stem cells, epidermal stem cells, skin-derived progenitor cells, adipose stem cells, fibroblasts and platelets.