Study Status: Completed
Recruit Status: Completed
Study Type: Interventional
Official Title: The Influence of Antibiotic Prophylaxis on Intraoperative Prosthetic Joint Infection Cultures
Brief Summary:
Total joint replacement is a common clinical practice for patients suffering from disabling arthritis, since it provides significant pain relief and functional recovering. Nevertheless, its outcome is compromised by complications such as periprosthetic joint infection (PJI), which is reported to occur in 1 to 4% of primary total knee arthroplasties (TKA), and approximately 1% of primary total hip replacements (THR). Despite all efforts to restrain PJI, its prevalence may reach even higher proportions if patients undergo a resection arthroplasty or irrigation and débridement for infected prosthesis. That said, timely diagnosis and early isolation of the infected microorganism is utterly important, if proper care is to be delivered.
The gold standard for the diagnosis of PJI is the isolation of a microorganism from the intraoperative cultures, combined with the sonication from retrieved joint implants1. This technique applies sound energy to agitate and disrupt biofilm, dislodging adherent bacterias to the bone cement, which has been proved to be a more sensitive method than conventional intraoperative cultures. False-negative percentages were reported to be 15% in patients who did not receive extended antibiotic prophylaxis and 60% if extended antibiotic therapy was administered.
Regardless of an adequate clinical, radiographic and surgical suspicion confirming PJI, an organism is not always successfully isolated from the intraoperative cultures, which increases false negatives results. This fact has been trying to be explained by several authors, some of which postulate that antibiotic prophylaxis could interfere with the isolation of the microorganism from the intraoperative cultures. As a result, and acting accordingly to this hypothesis, preoperative antibiotics are often withheld until intraoperative cultures are