Beneficial effects of oral administration of Lactobacillus acidophilus on second-degree burn wound healing process in rats

Burn is among common injuries and its incidence is especially high in middle-income countries. While there are different therapies for this medical issue, because of their defects, new therapies for burn wound management are needed. Probiotics are microorganisms that may have considerable beneficial effects for their hosts when administered in adequate amount. In cutaneous injuries, probiotic therapies with some probiotic strains of bacteria have illustrated some considerable and promising effects in the wound healing process. As previous researches have shown, probiotic effects are strain-specific. Therefore, in this study, we assessed the effects of oral administration of L.acidophilus (ATCC=4356) on deep second-degree burn wound healing. Using a heated aluminum bar, second-degree burn wounds were induced on the back of 60-naive Wistar rat (weighting 200-25 g). The rats randomly divided into three experimental (received bacteria in distilled water by gavage), negative control (no treatment) and vehicle control (received only distilled water by gavage) groups. The experiment lasted for 14 consecutive days. Burned area size was measured on the days 1, 3,7and 14 for calculation of healing percent of the wounds, and tissue samples were acquired on the same days for histology analysis. Results demonstrated a significant difference in the wound healing percent between the experimental and the control groups, on the day 7 (p<0.05) and a nonsignificant difference on the day 14 (p> 0.05). In addition, microscopic analysis (by comparing the number of polymorphonuclear cells in the wound area) showed that in the day 3 of experiments, the experimental group had a lower inflammatory response than the control ones. Moreover, on the day 7 post-burn, fibroblastic migration, granulation tissue formation and new-epithelialization was higher in the experimental groups than the controls. Overall, the oral administration of L.acidophilus had significant beneficial effects on the deep second-degree burn wound healing in the Wistar rats.