The local effects of Thymus vulgaris L. essential oil on healing the cutaneous incisional wounds in the case of rats infected with Candida albicans (a histopathological study)

Wound infections caused by Candida albicans, have substantially grown in recent years. The lack of easy access, medicine costliness, side effects, and development of the pharmaceutical resistance resulted in using biological materials as an alternative. Thymus vulgaris L. is one of the antimicrobial properties of biological materials, whose effectiveness has been proved from a long time ago. This study analyzed the local effects of Thymus essential oil on healing the cutaneous incisional wounds in the case of rats infected with Candida albicans. In this experiment, carried out on 36 Wistar male rats with an average weight of 210±10 g, after general anesthesia and making a 1.5×1.5 cm square wound between the shoulder area, 0.5 ml. of the yeast suspension containing 1.5×106 CFU/ml Candida albicans was applied to the wound(s). Then, in three groups of 12 (to control with 3 percent and 1.5 percent local ointments), the rats were randomly distributed into 4 subgroups of 3 animals (each group was sampled on different days). During the experiment, in order to assess the histopathology and yeast count, at the end of 4th, 8th, 12th, 16th, and 20th days, samples were taken by a special biopsy punch. According to the result drawn from this experiment, and regarding the effects of 3 percent and 1.5 percent ointments, there was not a conspicuous dissimilarity in reducing the Candida albicans yeast count, but in comparison with the control group, this dissimilarity was noticeably meaningful (P