Effect of Oral Glutamine on Clean and Clean Contaminated Wounds

L-glutamine is a nonessential and most prevalent amino acid. It was thought that glutamine was not a necessary component of the oral diet because of the relative amount of glutamine in the body compared with other amino acids and the fact that the body can independently produce glutamine but studies have suggested that the glutamine is indeed needed in surgical stress where the utilisation of Glutamine increases so does the requirement, thus can become conditionally essential in humans. Surgical patients with glutamine supplementation were found to have reduced incidence of wound complications such as infection, wound gaping and abscess formation compared to the patients without glutamine infusion. Clean wounds are those wounds which consists of uninfected operative incisions in which there is no inflammation is found. Clean-contaminated wounds are those operative wounds in which the alimentary, respiratory, genito-urinary tracts are entered under controlled conditions and without unusual contamination. In our study, we supplemented oral glutamine at the dose of 15gm/day for 5 days in operated cases of clean (30) and clean contaminated (30) wounds and we compared the rate of wound infection in these cases with the patients who were not supplemented. The distribution of incidence of surgical site infection (SSI) among the cases studied is significantly higher in Group 2 compared to Group 1 (P-valuegreater than0.05). The distribution of incidence of surgical site infection (SSI) in hernia group among the cases studied did not differ significantly between two study groups (P-valuegreater than0.05). The distribution of incidence of surgical site infection (SSI) in appendicitis group among the cases studied did not differ significantly between two study groups (P-valuegreater than0.05).