The effect of honey on wound healing; a systematic review

Introduction: Honey is one of the natural compounds used to heal skin wounds that does not cause side effects unlike medicines and chemicals. Honey has effects such as antibacterial effect, natural angiogenesis and natural debridement that these properties can be used for wound healing. There have been many studies on honey and its topical use has been found to be useful for the prevention and healing of skin wounds. Accordingly, we plan to systematically review the effect of honey on wound healing.Methods: By examining the databases of SID, Irandoc, Google Scholar, PubMed, Medline, Scopus, Cochrane Library, Science Direct and using keywords such as; honey wound healing and prevention ; all clinical trial articles which used honey and other products derived from honey were used as placebo or compared with other treatments, were included in the study. The electronic search was performed without any time limit. This review article used the 2009 PRISMA checklist and articles with animal specimen samples, repetitive articles, non-transparent statistical results, incomplete articles, and all articles with less than 30 samples were excluded.Results: Finally, 46 clinical trial studies with inclusion criteria were evaluated. Studies have shown that honey has been used to heal burn wounds, post-operative wounds, episiotomy wounds, cutaneous grafts and chronic wounds including pressure ulcers, diabetic foot ulcers, venous ulcers. In these studies, the effect of honey was higher than Vaseline gas dressing, Silver Sulfadiazine 1% ointment, Aminotic membrane dressing, Polyurethane film, and decreased healing time, decreased wound healing, decreased wound pH, no infection at the wound site and increased granulation was reported. These studies have also found honey to be more effective in partial and superficial wounds and burn wounds less than 40% of the body than other wounds. Honey has been able to reduce healing time in acute wounds between 4 days and 1 week and chronic wounds by 5 weeks.Conclusions: Due to the honey properties and its compounds, this plant can maintain moisture, increase viscosity, reduce infection and causes better skin cohesion. It is much more effective and less costly in the quality and speed of wound healing than traditional treatment, and since traditional medicine is important and has been proven to have less complications for many years, it seems that replacing this method with conventional methods or using it as a complementary wound healing can improve wound healing and improve community health.

کلیدواژه ها:

Honey ، Wound Healing ، Complementary Medicine ، Systematic Review