Faster injuries if you are a chimpanzee than a person
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Human wounds take almost three times to heal as injuries from other mammals, including chimpanzees, which are among our closest living relatives. It is not clear why, but it can be an evolutionary adaptation related to the loss of most of our body hair.
People have a slow healing compared to other animals. To see how slow it is this, Akiko Matsumoto-in in the University of Ryukyus in Japan and his colleagues resorted to four other species of primates: velvet monkeys (Chlorocebus Píyro), Sykes monkeys (Cercopithecus albógularis), Oliva Babuinos (Papio Anubis) and chimpanzees (Troglodytes bread).
The researchers anesthetized at least five of each type of primates, shaved a small hair patch and created a circular wound of 40 millimeters wide, which treated with an antibiotic ointment and covered with a gauze for a day to protect.
Photographs and wound measures, tasks every two days, revealed that everyone was cured at about 0.61 millimeters per day.
Then, Matsumoto-on and his colleagues looked at 24 patients at the University of the Ryukyus hospital after the tumors of the skin were removed, discovers that the cured cures at a rate of only 0.25 millimeters per day.
The researchers also studied mice and rats, and found almost the same healing rate as in non -human primates. This suggests that it can be an evolutionarily optimally optimally healing rate for most mammals, but not humans, says Matsumoto-deb.
“The most important thing, we find that chimpanzees exhibited the same wound healing rate as other non -human primates, that the slow barley of wounds seen in humans probably evolved after divergence,” soy.
It is not known why this happened, but she says she can be linked to how the first humans adapted to hot environments. “The slowest wound healing rate in humans can be linked to evolutionary changes, such as body hair reduction,” says Matsumoto-in. “Higher hair density leads to an increase in voice cell numbers, resulting in faster healing.”
Social support, in the form of food, nursing and medicine exchange, may have compensated the disadvantages of slow healing, he says.
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