Permeability of thermally damaged skin: I. Immediate influences of 60 degrees C scalding on hairless mouse skin.

Freshly sacrificed hairless mice were burned dorsally by direct contact with 60 degrees C water for periods ranging from 15 seconds to 8 min. Wounds ranging in degree from superficial epidermis damage to injury penetrating well into subcutaneous musculature were inflicted. Burned skin sections and reference abdominal skin sections were excised, placed in diffusion cells and investigated with regards to their permeabilities to water, methanol, ethanol, n-butanol and n-octanol. The data were couched in terms of ratios of permeability coefficients of burned skin to normal skin (scalding coefficients) for the same animal. Scalding increased permeability of skin to all compounds studied but the effects leveled out by 60 seconds. Protracted scalding was without great effect despite progressively increased depth of damage to the tissue as noted in histological sections. The degree of lost barrier competency attributable to 60 degrees C scalding was not marked for any compound but was definitely different for different alkanols. An approximately 3-fold permeability increase was noted with n-butanol, the most affected compound. The data demonstrate that near instantaneous alterations in permeability of skin accompany scalding, that decreased barrier competency does not correlate with the severity of a burn as measured in depth of the burn, and that thermal alteration of permeabilities is dependent on the physicochemical characteristics of the permeants.