ABSTRACT

Chronic wounds are not easy to heal. Research in wound physiology has shown that healing is accelerated when the wounds are kept moist. Over the last three decades, occlusive dressings that create a moist wound environment have brought revolutionary changes to the world of wound management. Since 1987, moist wound dressings based on calcium alginates have been commercially available. While alginate dressings produce accelerated healing, they are very expensive. The present work is directed to developing less expensive dressings from chemically modified cotton, which will provide moist healing conditions. This paper reports on the formation of highly absorbent dressings made from the chemical modification of preformed cotton gauze/nonwoven. These dressings would absorb high amounts of body fluid (from exudating wounds) and would be similar to alginate materials. Gauze bandage rolls are modified into highly absorbent carboxymethylated bandage rolls, eliminating the need for any subsequent converting operation. Chemical modification (carboxymethylation, CM-cotton) was carried out by treating cotton gauze rolls or nonwoven rolls with caustic and monochloroacetic acid in 90/10 ethanol/water media. Post treating Na-CM-cotton rolls, on ion exchanging, made it possible to obtain Ca/Na-CM-cotton gauze rolls. Ca/Na-CM-gauze will be competitive with calcium alginate dressings.