CORR Insights?: Sonication of antibiotic spacers predicts failure during two-stage revision for prosthetic knee and hip infections

摘要

Infection recurrence remains an important problem following two-stage exchange arthroplasty for the treatment of peri-prosthetic joint infection. Mortazavi and colleagues [6] reported reinfection in 28% of patients treated with this protocol for infected knee arthroplasty. Reinfection may be attributed to either infection with new microorganisms or failure to eradicate the initial infection despite the first-stage procedure and antibiotic administration [11]. Undiagnosed persistence of infection is of major concern because reim-plantation in this setting will likely lead to failure. Therefore, the key question is whether infection has been controlled following the first stage and, as a corollary, whether we can proceed with the second stage.