Best Practices and Evolving Techniques for Preventing Infection After Fracture Surgery

Orthopedic trauma-related infections remain one of the major complications in modern trauma and orthopedic surgery. Despite current preventive practices, infection rates range from ~1% after operative fixation of closed low-energy fractures to>30% in complex open tibia fractures. Fracture-related infections negatively impact clinical outcome with lifelong functional impairment and significantly increase health care expenditure. In addition, the escalating issue of antimicrobial resistance continues to pose a challenge to clinicians. Unfortunately, in orthopedic trauma, only a few preventive measures are strongly supported by past studies and for most measures, there are insufficient data. Surgical site infection prevention guidelines established by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) are generalized for all surgical disciplines and do not take into account the specifics of fracture-related infections. The most important difference in orthopedic trauma patients from the other surgical disciplines is the ability of skin colonizers and contaminating organisms to establish infection on implants and form biofilms. The bacteria can then resist conventional infection control measures and prophylactic antibiotic therapy. To effectively decrease fracture-related infections, there needs to be a multidisciplinary clinical approach, which should recognize the unique aspects of such infections and develop strategies on the basis of ...
Source: Techniques in Orthopaedics - Category: Orthopaedics Tags: Symposium Source Type: research