Burn to leg: full thickness lower limb burn associated with laptop power adaptor.

There has been much media attention in recent years on laptops and their accessories overheating and even causing fires. Here, the authors report a case of a laptop power adaptor causing a full thickness burn requiring surgical intervention in a young, fit man. The total contact time was less than 1 h. Initial surgical management involved debridement and allografting of the wound due to a concomitant cellulitis. A week later, once the cellulitis had resolved, an autograft was applied. The graft take was satisfactory (100%) and the patient had a good postoperative outcome.

Xenon pretreatment attenuates anesthetic-induced apoptosis in the developing brain in comparison with nitrous oxide and hypoxia.

BACKGROUND: Administration of certain general anesthetics to rodents during the synaptogenic phase of neurodevelopment produces neuronal injury. Preconditioning (pretreatment) can reduce tissue injury caused by a severe insult; the authors investigated whether pretreatment strategies can protect the developing brain from anesthetic-induced neurotoxicity. METHODS: Seven-day-old Sprague-Dawley rats were pretreated with one of the following: 70% xenon, 70% nitrous oxide, or 8% hypoxia for 2 h; 24 h later, rats were exposed to the neurotoxic combination of 70% nitrous oxide and 0.75% isoflurane for 6 h. Cortical and hippocampal neuroapoptosis was assessed using caspase-3 immunostaining. Separate cohorts were maintained for 40 days at which time cognitive function with trace fear conditioning was performed. In other pretreated cohorts, rat cortices were isolated for immunoblotting of caspase-3, Bcl-2, cytochrome C, P53, and mitogen-activated protein kinases. To obviate physiologic influences, organotypic hippocampal slices harvested from postnatal rat pups were cultured for 5 days and exposed to the same conditions as obtained for the in vivo studies, and caspase-3 immunostaining was again the measured outcome. RESULT: Xenon pretreatment prevented nitrous oxide- and isoflurane-induced neuroapoptosis (in vivo and in vitro) and cognitive deterioration (in vivo). Contrastingly, nitrous oxide- and isoflurane-induced neuroapoptosis was exacerbated by hypoxic pretreatment. Nitrous oxide pretreatment had no effect. Xenon pretreatment increased Bcl-2 expression and decreased both cytochrome C release and P53 expression; conversely, the opposite was evident after hypoxic pretreatment. CONCLUSIONS: Although xenon pretreatment protects against nitrous oxide- and isoflurane-induced neuroapoptosis, hypoxic pretreatment exacerbates anesthetic-induced neonatal neurodegeneration.