Joost Peerbooms

46 Chapter 3 or prosthesis. Platelet gels, however, have a high concentration of platelets that release the bioactive proteins and growth factors are necessary to initiate and accelerate tissue repair and enhance dermal and epidermal regeneration. We used a specially designed wound study scoring system; to our knowledge no measure of wound leakage has previously been described for this type of study. Several of the patients had incomplete data sets. This is explained by the integration of two hospitals into one during the second half of the trial; we underestimated the deleterious effect of this reorganization on the quality of data collection at ward level. There is no clear explanation for the difference between the rate at which patients from both groups were not recorded; we can only assume that this is coincidental. Between group analysis of patient characteristics at baseline did not show any statistically significant differences of the patients with or without complete data recoding. Due to this dropout of data, we had a severe loss of statistical power with regard to our primary outcome measure (wound closure). However, our results regarding to wound closure, follow a similar trend as all secondary outcome measures, and are compliant with our clinical observations and strengthening our conclusion. Another limitation of our study is that we did not investigate the effect of varying platelet and fibrinogen concentrations. Acknowledgements The authors thank Paula Dekkers and Ferry Claproth for preparation of the platelet gel and Yvonne Fest and Patricia van Veen for recruiting the patients.