Survival in major burn injuries treated by one bathing in cerium nitrate

Sixty-four patients aged 16–74 years with total body surface area burns (TBSA) ranging from 30 to 90 per cent, were given one bathing in 0.04 M cerium nitrate within 4h of admission to hospital. Of 21 patients aged 16–30 years, one died (aged 28 with 90 per cent TBSA), and of those aged 31–74 years, two died, one (aged 50 years with 55 per cent TBSA) had multiple internal injuries, the other (aged 51 years with 55 per cent TBSA) had a pulmonary embolism at day 19. Two risk scores, developed from data on 11200 burn patients treated by standard methods (Roi et al. 1983), were applied to the analysis of risk for 59 patients for whom both total burn surface (TB) and full thickness (FT) areas had been recorded. About 20 patients bore risk of 0.8 or greater on the FT scale and 1.0 on the TB scale, yet instead of 80 per cent deaths among these, only two died. No FT assessment had been made on the multiple injury death whose TB risk score was 0.66. Such survival results in high-risk patients should encourage the use of cerium nitrate for treating serious burn injury.