Cotton-based health care textile: a mini review

Cotton and its derivate have been widely employed as a medical and biomedical product in the health care textile area for a long time. The cotton-based products have been used in external applications such as surgical clothing, surgical covers, beddings, and internal applications such as traditional and advanced wound dressing, tissue engineering, drug delivery, surgical area, and dental applications. The product must be accurately qualified in vitro and in vivo due to the final application to be used as an internal biomaterial. Since the nineteenth century, cotton has been used to cover the wounds to warm the wound area as well as act as a barrier to avoid bacterial entrance. Huge products based on cotton and modified cotton gauze have been synthesized to meet different requirements of biomedicals over time to varying medical demands. Cotton has unique properties that make it a favorable candidate for biomaterial production and medical use. These include large surface area, favorable mechanical property, porosity structure, suitable gas permeability, cellulose fibers, etc. Nowadays, researchers are innovating, making modern and ultra-modern new functional cotton base biomaterials incredible. Cotton was the subject of enormous study for physical and chemical modification. The current review aimed to summarize the latest developed cotton base biomedical materials due to the impressive increase in the number of publications regarding cotton and cotton derivatives biomaterials.