MGSC student, Richard Mark Bresler, along with his two other colleagues published an article in the Journal of Burn Care & Research looking forward to discover more about the gaps in the research of Pediatric Burn Care and what can be done to address these issues.
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Abstract
Introduction
Burns are the fourth most common cause of injury worldwide. The burden of burn injury is largely carried by low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) with children in these regions being particularly vulnerable to burns. The purpose of this scoping review is to identify knowledge gaps in global pediatric burn care experience in an effort to help prioritize future research.
Methods
This study follows the Arksey and O’Malley 5-stage framework for conducting a scoping review.13 Studies relevant to pediatric burns in LMICs over the past decade were extracted from the PubMed, Embase, and Cochrane Library databases. With the assistance of a university librarian, a search strategy using MeSH searches in the electronic databases PubMed, Embase, and Cochrane Library restricted to the years 2010 to 2020 and human subjects age birth 18 years, was applied to include combined terms for burns, low-income countries, and low-middle-income countries. No language restriction was included in the search strategy. Articles were categorized according to country, geographical region, and level of evidence. LMICs were classified amongst the World Bank 2021 Classification as “Low-Income” or “Lower-Middle Income.” 14 Studies were excluded if the articles study period did not overlap with a time period when the corresponding country was a LMIC, or included animals as study subjects.
Results
The search strategy yielded 646 records in PubMed, 291 records in Embase and 21 records in Cochrane Library. PubMed and Cochrane database search results were all in English. The majority of Embase search results were in English (286) with 3 in French and 1 each in German and Russian. One duplicate record within the Embase results was removed. One hundred and fifty-two duplicates across Embase, PubMed, and Cochrane Library search results were removed, yielding 805 records. Six hundred and eighty-three did not meet inclusion criteria. Fifteen articles were excluded because the article’s study period did not overlap with a time period when the corresponding country was a LMIC (Figure 1). All 107 studies meeting inclusion criteria were published in English (Appendix A). Thirty-six (34%) and 52 (49%) originated from South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, respectively. Nineteen (18%) papers originated from the other geographical areas (Middle East and North Africa, East Asia, West Asia, Pacific, Latin America, Caribbean, Europe and Central Asia) (Table 1). There were 53 studies focused only on the pediatric population and 54 mixed studies with combined pediatric and adult groups. Seven studies were specific to Flame/Flash burns, 3 Scald Burns, 4 Electrical burns, and the remaining 93 included all types of burns.