Clinical Trial: The Occlusive Dressing

Study Status: Recruiting
Recruit Status: Recruiting
Study Type: Interventional




Official Title: The Occlusive Dressing: a Comparative Randomized Trial on 2 Procedures of Treatment of Fingertips Traumatic Amputations

Brief Summary: Fingers amputations are very common injuries among the patients arriving at the Emergency Department. Fingertips amputations classified in 2nd and 3rd zones, in accordance with Rosenthal's classification (after the solum unguis), constitute a large proportion of them. The treatment aims at restoring a pulp with its sensitivity and a good subcutaneous fat tissue. The usual care of these amputations is a surgical treatment: it consists of pulp reconstruction by a flap (for example palmar V-Y advancement flaps of Atazoy). These technique involve hospital admission, brachial plexus anaesthesia, a surgical approach with cicatrix and donor site morbidities, postoperative cares, post-surgical pain management. And of course attention must be paid to the risks of postoperative complications related either to anaesthesia and/or to surgery, like necrosis, infection, and others. We have developed a nonoperative treatment for fingertips amputations: the occlusive dressing. It's a technique that has been known for about twenty years, and that is currently developed by the teams SOS main of Professor Liverneaux in Strasbourg and of Professor Obert in Besançon. It consists of the occlusive application of two Tegaderm®, a plastic dressing. Then the finger macerates in an anaerobic medium, and could develop an uncomfortable smell induced by maceration process. The first results described by the preclinical studies of these two groups look satisfying on both the functional aspect (sensibility) and the aesthetic component (preservation of the finger length and curve), as well as for healing that occurs without infection. Moreover, the length of the treatment is of about only three or four weeks, and its cost is very low by comparison with the cost of the surgery itself. Nevertheless this technique is still not very common, and it has been reported in only five references in the literature [Mennen & Al., Farrell & Al., Lee & Al., Allen & Al., Tago Hiroyuk &