A Surgical Suture Secures Your Tissues to Help Your Body Heal

Posted by dunitzsantrino on December 26th, 2014

A Surgical Suture is commonly called surgical stitch. It is used to hold the body tissues back together after a surgery is done, or in case of any injuries. A needle is used along with some length of thread attached to it for this purpose. Ever since its invention, threads of different sizes, shapes, and materials have been used. The needles were commonly made of bone, or different metals like copper, silver, and aluminum bronze wire. The sutures used plant materials like cotton, hemp, or flax, or animal material like tendons, hair, muscle strips, silk, arteries, or catgut.

The needles used for a Surgical Suture can be eyed or reusable needles. Such needles have eyes or holes, and do not come with a suture thread. It is supplied separately. The suture needs to be threaded when required. As such any needle and thread combination could be used according to your requirement. A traumatic or swaged needles are those which are eyeless and pre-packed. They have a certain length of suture attached to it. This makes sure no time is spent for the threading purpose. They can be used as soon as the pack is opened. The suture end is smaller in such cases. This eliminates the drag from the thread attachment site. The drug can cause trauma to the tissues in the case of eyed needles.

Modern absorbable sutures are usually made of synthetic materials like polylactic acid, polydioxanone, polyglycolic acid, monocryl. The non absorbable ones use nylon, PVDF, polyester, and polypropylene. Coating the sutures with antimicrobial substances is also done in order to reduce the chances of being affected by a wound infection. The sutures used need to be really strong. They must be able to hold the tissues securely and also flexible enough to be knotted. They must avoid the wick effect, which may cause infections in the body by allowing the fluid run through the suture tract.

Absorbable sutures are most commonly used. They are naturally biodegradable, and degrade in your body slowly. The body absorbs the suture material over time. Catgut is the original material used for absorbable sutures until the synthetic ones came into the market. Hydrolysis, proteolytc enzymatic degradation, and other such processes break down the sutures in the body. It may take about 10 days to 8 weeks for degradation depending on the type of material used. In internal body tissues and for patients who cannot come back for removing the sutures, such kind of self degrading sutures are used. They are strong enough for the intended purpose, and slowly degrade away to get rid of all the foreign material inside the body. They are reliable and help your body heal within the time required.