Vol. 8, Issue 12 (2019)

Author(s):
Vishaka GV, Rathore MS, Chandrashekhraiah M, Hasansab Nadaf and Sinha RB

Abstract:
Silk is an untangled mass of fibers woven by silkworms called as queen of textiles with beautiful lusture and unique properties. Silks are a group of fibrous proteins with high mechanical strength, antibacterial properties, biocompatibility, versatility in processing, the ease of sterilization, thermal stability and controllable degradation features making silk as promising biomaterial for many clinical functions. With this background, a study was conducted to assess the utilization of silk as a suture in clinical or biomedical science. A structured questioner was developed to collect the data from respondents. Data was collected from 60 professional working in medical field with having surgery experience. The salient finding of the study was 90.00 percent of the respondents were found to be using silk as a suture in different surgical operations. Further, they perceived that the silk as a suture is ligature for permanent, removal of fixtures and cardiovascular surgeries for suturing the grafts and can be used for closing of wounds and as sutures in holding the insertions. However, they also perceive that the percent use of silk was low compared to nylon and cotton but the trend for using silk was in the increasing order due to the very unique advantages like silk is very slow absorbable nor it is subjected to degradation or weakening by the action of tissue enzymes and it is natural material and elicits minimal inflammatory reaction on skin or tissue. The result of the study signified that silk suture facilitate easy passage through tissues and exhibit a good knotting strength and secure knot placement. The study indicated that the trend is changing from synthetic sutures to natural sutures to reduce the environmental impacts and apart from that, silk is on the way to bioengineering.