Cardiac dysfunction development in the early stage postburn has been an important problem in burn treatment. However, no eective therapies are available for use in clinical practice. In this study, we sought to determine whether early total eschar excision (EEE) in one operation and the traditional Chinese herb Panax notoginseng (PNS) would be helpful in improving early postburn cardiac function. 160 Wistar rats were randomly divided into burn (burn group, n=50), burn treated with EEE (EEE group, n=50), burn treated with PNS (PNS group, n=50) groups and normal controls (n=10). All rats except the normal control were given a 30% TBSA full skin thickness burn and resuscitated with Ringer’s lactate. EEE was performed immediately after the burn group received the first intraperitoneal injection of Ringer’s lactate. The wound was covered with homoskin from normal rats. In the PNS group, two doses of PNS (200 mg/kg for each dose) were given intraperitoneally immediately and 4 h postburn. Cardiac contractile function and cardiac troponin T (TnT) were determined at 1, 3, 6, 12 and 24 h postburn. Results showed that cardiac contractile parameters including AOSP, AODP, LVSP and +dp/dtmax all declined and were still significantly lower than the control values at 24 h postburn. Cardiac TnT was elevated markedly and reached a level 25 times higher than control at 12 h postburn. In EEE and PNS groups, the reduction of cardiac contractile function was limited as compared with that in the burn group. Levels of TnT in both EEE and PNS groups were significantly lower than in the burn group 6 h postburn later. The findings of this study demonstrated that both EEE and PNS were eective in improving early postburn cardiac function. # 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd and ISBI. All rights reserved.