Laser Therapy for Pediatric Burn Scars: Focusing on a Combined Treatment Approach

Treatment with laser therapy has the potential to greatly improve hypertrophic scarring in individuals who have sustained burn injuries. More specifically, recent research has demonstrated the success of using pulsed dye laser therapy to help reduce redness and postburn pruritus and using ablative fractional CO2 laser therapy to improve scar texture and thickness. This study describes our early experience using laser therapy in our pediatric burn program and details our specific treatment approach when using each laser individually and in combination during the same procedure. A retrospective before-after study of patients with hypertrophic burn scars who were treated with laser therapy at our pediatric institution was performed. One hundred and twenty-five patients were treated over a total of 289 laser sessions with more than 50% of patients under the age of 5 years at the first treatment. The majority of procedures were performed using both the pulsed dye and CO2 lasers in combination. Before-after Vancouver Scar Scale scores decreased from 7.37 (SD, 2.46) to 5.76 (SD, 2.29) after a single treatment. The results obtained from this study support the use of laser therapy to improve hypertrophic burn scars in the pediatric population. Rigorous randomized controlled trials are needed to confirm the effectiveness of this therapy.