5 Important Benefits of Skin Grafts in Helping Wounds to Heal

As the name suggests, chronic wounds are just that: wounds that don’t follow a normal healing timeline. And when wounds don’t heal in a timely manner, the stage is set for some very serious issues that include limb-threatening infections.

The stats surrounding chronic wounds in the United States are eye-opening. For starters, for the more than 40 millions Americans who have diabetes, foot ulcers develop in up to one-third of this group. While diabetes is a major driver of chronic wounds, they’re also common among older populations and 3% of people over the age of 65 years have open wounds.

As a board-certified wound specialist in chronic foot, ankle, and leg wounds, Dr. Thomas Rambacher and the team at Foot Ankle Leg Wound Care Orange County have a comprehensive toolkit for chronic wounds. One of the biggest workhorses in this toolkit are skin grafts, which offer some incredible benefits for slow-healing wounds.

A quick word about skin grafts

Before we get into the benefits of using skin grafts to promote healing, we first want to describe these grafts. In some cases, we can use healthy skin from other parts of your body. When this isn’t available, we turn to advanced wound care products that include bioengineered skin grafts.

Now let’s look at some of the many benefits of these skin grafts.

1. Creating a barrier

Your skin is your body’s largest organ and its primary mission is to create a barrier between your body and the world around you. So, when you’re injured and this barrier is damaged, your body’s top priority is to close this breach as quickly as possible to prevent harmful invaders, such as bacteria and viruses, from gaining access.

One of the chief characteristics of a chronic wound is its inability to close, which is why we also refer to chronic wounds as open wounds. When this happens, it literally leaves the door open to invaders and we can close this door with a skin graft.

2. Preventing infection

This benefit goes hand-in-hand with creating a barrier. The foreign invaders we’re trying to keep out are the ones that lead to infection. Once infection takes hold, the wound becomes harder to heal as infections are designed to spread.

Using a skin graft, we can not only close an open wound, we can eliminate any existing infection and create a healthy skin barrier that can keep the wound from becoming reinfected.

3. Relieving your pain

Chronic wounds tend to develop around your lower legs, ankles, and feet, so their location alone can make them painful. Add this to the fact that slow-healing wounds are active, so pain is often part of the picture. With a skin graft, we encourage faster healing, which brings pain relief along with it.

4. Creating the right healing environment

One of the keys to healing is to create an environment that’s moist and well vascularized (good blood vessel coverage). With an open wound, this environment is tricky to achieve, but with the help of a skin graft, we can.

5. Restoring function and strength to your skin

When we place a skin graft, your body responds by releasing fibroblasts that encourage collagen production and skin remodeling. Collagen is a protein that’s responsible for the strength and structure in your skin so it’s an important element in skin function. 

The fibroblasts that your body releases help to integrate the skin graft with collagen and to build up the strength in your healing skin.

As you can see, skin grafts play an invaluable role when it comes to getting chronic wounds to heal properly.

If you’d like to learn more about skin grafts or you want to have a slow-healing wound evaluated, please call our office in Mission Viejo, California, at 949-832-6018 or request an appointment online today.