A Study of Sympathetic Skin Response in Burns with Different Mechanisms

Abstract

Sensory, motor, and autonomic neuropathies have been reported after electrical injuries. In addition subclinical involvement of the sympathetic nervous system during post injury and late clinical manifestations of this involvement have been pointed out in some studies. The present study was done to explore how the clinical and electro-diagnostic manifestations of sympathetic involvement would change over time in burn victims. About 164 patients with electrical, chemical and thermal burn injuries were explored for sympathetic skin response (SSR) and monitoring of automatic system derangement symptoms. The wave amplitude of the sympathetic response of the patients with chemical electrical and thermal burn is reduced, compared with the control group and it is not significant (P>0.05). The latency value of the SSR wave of the patients with the three types of burn injuries indicates that the SSR wave height is reduced and the reduction has been significant compared with the control group (P 0.05). SSR intensity can be used as a predictive test for the automatic system derangement symptoms that occur after burn injury.