Gelatin sealing to prevent blood loss from knitted arterial grafts

E arly use of fabric arterial grafts was attended by serious hemorrhage when flow was re-established after surgical placement. Efforts to control blood loss by reducing pore size have been successful but as pore size has become smaller, fabric grafts have tended to resembIe sohd-wall tubes. Edwards3 showed in 1957 that tubes with solid walls were unsuitable for use as arterial grafts because the solid walls delayed or prevented healing of the inner fibrin lining and thrombosis occurred frequently. After pondering the question of how to provide walls solid enough to be leakproof, yet porous enough to heal, we thought the answer might be a porous graft coated with an impervious material which would be slowly absorbed by the body. Gelatin film, known to be absorbable with minimal reaction, appeared to be a logical coating material. In the course of our experiments a flexible gelatin coating was developed and tested which controlled blood loss from fabric grafts while causing only a minimal delay in normal healing.