N-acetylcysteine in the Effective Management of TEN-associated Severe Skin Lesions

Abstract

Adverse drug reaction (ADR) is a serious life-threatening event and toxic epidermal necrolysis (TEN) is a serious ADR where severe skin lesions like, blisters with oral mucosal bleeding (OMB) are most common characteristics. Both watery blisters and OMB are painful conditions in TEN and considered as common source of infections. N-acetylcysteine (NAC) has anti-inflammatory property and the objective of this study was to observe the clinical response of NAC in the TEN-associated lesions management. For this study, we considered 17 patients those were suffering from TEN and admitted in the intensive care unit. Those 17 patients were distributed into 2 groups (A and B), where patients of group-A (n=7) treated with NAC while group-B's patients (n= 10) did not get NAC therapy. As a result, in group-A, 6 (85.71%; n=7) patients were found with complete remission of blisters and OMB progression within the 72 hours with 100% 10-day complete healing rate, whereas 60% patients in group-B (n= 10) required >72 hours for complete remission with 80% 10-day complete healing rate. So, NAC can be an effective therapy for prompt healing of life-threatening TEN-associated severe skin lesions.