Gretchen Summer

Kaiser Permanente · Northern California Patient Care Services

Thermal burns induce pain at the site of injury, mechanical hyperalgesia, associated with a complex time-dependent inflammatory response. To determine the contribution of inflammatory mediators to burn injury-induced mechanical hyperalgesia, we measured dynamic changes in the levels of three potent hyperalgesic cytokines, interleukin IL-1 beta, IL-...

Severe burn induces severe pain. While chronic as well as acute pain syndromes are reported, the peripheral mechanisms of burn-induced chronic pain syndromes have not been studied. We tested the hypothesis that burn induces plastic changes in primary afferent nociceptors that predispose to chronic pain states. Mechanical nociceptive thresholds were...

Unlabelled: The development of more effective methods of relieving pain associated with burn injury is a major unmet medical need. Not only is acute burn injury pain a source of immense suffering, but it has been linked to debilitating chronic pain and stress-related disorders. Although pain management guidelines and protocols have been developed...

Unlabelled: Although mechanical hyperalgesia associated with medical procedures is the major source of severe pain in burn-injured patients, little is known about its underlying mechanism. One reason for this has been the lack of a model for mechanical hyperalgesia at the site of injury. We have modified an established partial-thickness burn model...

Critical care nurses can serve as pain management advocates so that those patients who undergo surgery and other procedures do not suffer needless pain. Research findings indicate that surgical and procedural pain can contribute to pathologic pain states related to nerve injury, tissue inflammation, and prolonged peripheral nociceptive input. Anima...

The scalp has become a popular donor site for split-thickness skin grafts. This donor site does, however, have complications, including the concrete scalp deformity, which consists of hairs embedded in a thick, desiccated, exudative crust. This article presents our burn unit's experience with this complication. Fifty-six patients underwent scalp sk...

Deep scalp donor sites can be difficult to manage because of the higher incidence of healing complications that can make daily wound care exquisitely painful. When faced with this problem, we prospectively studied the Unna "cap" dressing on the scalp. Group 1 received our standard treatment--Xeroform gauze (Sherwood Medical, St Louis, Mo) and daily...

The ideal oral wound care analgesic for children should be palatable, provide potent analgesia of rapid onset and short duration, and require minimal, yet appropriate, monitoring. With use of a double-blinded crossover design, we compared the efficacy and safety of oral transmucosal fentanyl citrate (OTFC) (approximately 10 micrograms/kg) with the...