Reversal of postburn immunosuppression by the administration of vitamin A.

The effect of high doses of vitamin A was evaluated on the suppression of cellular immunity after a 30% body surface area experimental scald burn in a mouse model. Male CBA/J mice were treated postburn with daily intraperitoneal injections of either 3000 IU of vitamin A or an equal volume of 0.9N saline. Similar groups of unburned mice were also studied as controls. At the seventh postburn day, one-way mixed lymphocyte reactions were tested for each group with whole spleen cells of CBA/J mice used as responders and mitomycin C-treated whole spleen cells of C57 BL/6 mice used as stimulators. When results were expressed as mean percentage of the values of control animals, no significant difference was observed between the saline-injected unburned control group (taken as 100%) and the vitamin A-treated unburned control groups (89%). The burned animals treated with saline showed suppression to 21% of the control values. However, the burned animals treated postburn with vitamin A improved the response rate dramatically to 52% of control values. This improvement over the untreated burned animals was significant in all experiments performed (p less than 0.02). This study suggests that vitamin A may be an effective agent in the reversal of cellular immunosuppression after burns.