[Free flaps use in chronic wounds: Retrospective study about 91 cases]

Chronic wounds represent a major health challenge with no current standardized surgical treatment. The use of free flaps is little discussed in the literature, with a supposed propensity to failure given unfavorable local conditions and land often debility. We present here the analysis of our monocentric experience of the use of free flaps in the curative treatment of chronic wounds.

We performed a retrospective monocentric study over 18 years of all free flaps used for the treatment of a chronic wound between January 2001 and September 2016. Several criteria were evaluated on patients, wounds, free flaps used and immediate to late outcomes.

Ninety-one patients were included (sex ratio M/F: 3.55) with an average age of 41.6±16 years. Wounds were localized to the leg in 92.3% of cases and 58% of patients had initial osteomyelitis. The flaps used were predominantly muscle flaps (61.6%). The flaps survival rate was 92.3%. With a mean follow-up of 50 months, the reconstructive failure rate was 20.9%. The presence of a chronic osteomyelitis is the only statistically significant factor of reconstruction failure (P=0.0169) with a risk of failure multiplied by 5.

Our study demonstrates that the reliability of free flaps in the treatment of chronic wounds is comparable, regardless of the time since the initial cutaneous lesion, to that existing in the treatment of acute wounds or in the reconstruction after oncological excision. The presence of a chronic osteomyelitis, however, represents a major risk of reconstruction failure by increasing 5 times the risk of failure. Recent changes in the integumentary reconstruction paradigm of the lower limb will undoubtedly allow in the next few years to establish more rationally the place of muscle free flaps in the therapeutic armamentarium of chronic wounds.