What should I know about skin graft therapies?

Skin grafts may be used to treat or repair skin that has been damaged by wounds, burns, or disease. To perform a skin graft, a surgeon removes a patch of healthy skin from one part of the body, known as the donor site. He or she then transplants the healthy skin to a part of the body where skin is damaged or missing. Skin grafts are usually successful, though in some cases additional grafts may be necessary.

Skin graft therapies usually work by taking skin from one place on your body and surgically putting it in the area where your skin has become depigmented. One therapy involves blistering your skin on both a pigmented and the depigmented area, and then transferring the pigmented skin to the depigmented area. Another therapy involves simply transferring pigmented skin to the depigmented area, but scarring is more likely with this method.

Skin grafts are a form of surgery. You may or may not be happy with the final results. Sometimes the grafted skin does not look like you may have expected it to look - there may be scars and the final color of the skin may not be exactly the same as the surrounding skin.