ABSTRACT
Thermal injury elicits major pathophysiologic alterations beyond the obvious cutaneous manifestation. Although the burn wound itself can present unique challenges in terms of therapeutic management and is responsible for the high incidence of infection that occurs in thermally injured patients, a number of metabolic aberrations and associated dysfunction of various organs are also commonly encountered, which directly contribute to morbidity and mortality. The magnitude of these latter derangements has led to the proposal that the burn patient is the universal trauma model with the greatest dysregulation of homeostasis of any injury (1,2). Major progress has been achieved in recent years in understanding many of the pathophysiologic mechanisms that occur in burn injury, and has facilitated patient management and improved survival. Such progress has been attributed to the development of specialized burn centers, increased investigative efforts in burn research, and the development of the team concept in patient management (3).
