Using Glue Instead of Stitches (Published 1997) (2024)

THROUGH the ages, a wide range of materials have been used to close deep cuts and other wounds, including cobwebs, the jaws of leaf-cutting insects and, in modern medicine, stitches and staples. But now another material is showing promise: glue.

Rather than put patients through the long, painful ordeal of sewing their wounds and in many cases removing the stitches a week or so later, doctors are finding that they can simply glue the edges together and send their patients home. The adhesives being used are chemical relatives of the kinds of glue found in factories as well as around the house, but they have been sterilized and modified for medical purposes.

Several recent studies involving children and adults show that certain wounds closed with glue heal just as well as those closed with stitches, and that the cosmetic results up to a year later are comparable. In the newest study, doctors were so pleased with one kind of medical glue that they predicted that it could replace stitches for about one-third of the 11 million wounds treated in hospital emergency rooms in the United States each year. The study is being published in today's issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association.

Dr. Alexander T. Trott, a professor of emergency medicine at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, whose commentary on the study also appears in the journal, said the study ''heralds a new technique and product that can come close to revolutionizing the way we care for lacerations.''

Dr. Thomas B. Bruns, a pediatric emergency room doctor at T. C. Thompson Children's Hospital in Chattanooga, Tenn., has studied different medical glues on children, done follow-up evaluations for one year and reached similar conclusions. ''I think glues can be used on a lot of lacerations,'' he said.

Medical glues are not new. They have been used for decades in Canada, Europe, Israel and the Far East. But doctors here paid little attention to them until the last year or so because the older glues had many limitations.