Airway Management and Smoke Inhalation Injury in the Burn Patient

Plastic surgeons frequently provide care to patients who have burn injuries and concomitant smoke inhalation injury II. About 10 of patients admitted to burn centers have II, which greatly increases their risk for postburn pneumonia and mortality, especially at the midranges of age and burn size.1 3 This article reviews the essential diagnostic and therapeutic interventions in the treatment of these patients. An understanding of II and what to do about it has only developed over the last 50 years. Consider the scene at Massachusetts General Hospital on the evening of November 28, 1942, following one of the largest indoor fire disasters in U.S. history, at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub.