History

Objective: To evaluate the immune response to pediatric thermal injury admitted to Duhok Burn and Plastic Surgery Hospital, Duhok, Iraq. Methods: 118 participants were recruited in this prospective cohort study. In this study, patients with thermal burns who were 18 years of age or younger and had at least 10% of their total body surface area burned were enrolled. The medical records were used to collect the patients' demographics, mechanism of burn, laboratory results, and outcomes. About 4 ml of blood samples were taken from each participant and collected in an EDTA tube at two time intervals (24 hours of burn and 72 hours or longer after burn). To determine whether a patient's total white blood cell count, neutrophils percentage, and lymphocyte percentage were normal or abnormal. Results: At the first day, (59%.4) patients had abnormal lymphocyte percentage, while (40.6%) patients had normal lymphocyte percentage. Nevertheless, this difference was not significant (p value 0.42). At the third day, (64.5%) of patients had abnormal lymphocyte percentage, while (35.5%) of patients had normal lymphocyte percentage, which was statistically not significant (p value 0.38). Conclusion: After three days in the hospital, the higher numbers of voluntaries showed no improvement. No significant correlation was found between normal and abnormal lymphocyte percentage between first and third day of burn. Further research is required by including all age groups with bigger sample size to study the whole immune response during thermal burn.