An Evaluation of Colour Change in Abrasion and its Correlation to Time: A Cross- Sectional Study from a Tertiary Care Centre

Abstract

Ageing of abrasions among Indian population compared to the West has a wide range of variations. There is not much reported work from India as to the healing pattern and morphological appearance of abrasions in correlation to time since injury. A cross sectional study of patients randomly selected for a naked eye examination of the abrasions compared with standard colour-charts. Comparison was then made between the standard literature and the data gathered to ascertain the applicability of the Western findings on Indian population. It is observed that fresh injuries and injuries which are more than 7 days old have a high percentage of agreement with the available literature. The Spearman’s rho showed positive correlation between time since injury and colour of abrasion to be 0.902 (p value<0.001). However those abrasions which age between 12 hours to 7 days have a lesser percentage agreement with the available literature in the standard text. The Spearman’s test of correlation for abrasions between 12 hours-7 days, after excluding extreme intervals which correlated completely with literature, still showed high correlation (Correlation Coefficient- 0.749, p value <0.001).
In patients with head injury the percentage agreement falls to 50 percent, conveying a delay in healing of abrasions. Subjects with diabetes in this study did not differ from other subjects in terms of healing statistically, possibly due to small sub-sample size.