Determining the frequency of infection and the factors affecting it after spinal surgeries

Abstract

Postoperative infection is one of the most common complications after many surgical procedures, sometimes even causing failure to achieve the goals of the surgery and also causing irreparable harm to the patient. Therefore, identifying the risk factors affecting postoperative infection is very important. The aim of this study is the Determining the frequency of infection and the factors affecting it after spinal surgeries. Materials and Methods: This study was cross-sectional and the target population was patients undergoing spinal surgery at Imam Reza and Shohada Hospital of Tabriz in the five years ending in 2023. The minimum sample size for patients with infection resulting from spinal surgery was estimated to be 100, and ultimately 500 patients were studied. The sampling method was census. Confirmation of the presence of infection was through the patients' clinical records and after confirmation by the infectious disease consultant. Initially, all spinal surgeries were extracted and after their registration, the cases with infection were identified to obtain the prevalence of infection in the first stage. After that, the relevant information was recorded in the data collection form. The first part of this form was the demographic information of the patients and the second part was questions such as the surgical area, surgical method, duration of surgery, amount of bleeding, and amount of blood transfusion. Results: In this study, the prevalence of postoperative infection was reported to be 30 cases (0.6%), of which the most common cause of postoperative infection in the studied patients was Staphylococcus aureus with 20 cases (66.7%), coagulase-negative staphylococcus with 6 cases (20.0%), and Pseudomonas with 4 cases (13.3%). Also, in this study, among the demographic, background, surgical and treatment variables, a statistically significant association was observed between female gender (P=0.021), history of corticosteroid use (P=0.042), diabetes mellitus (P=0.002), surgical duration of more than 2 hours (P=0.022), bleeding volume of more than one liter (P=0.009), and two units of blood transfusion (P=0.040) with postoperative infection; also, the age of patients with postoperative infection was significantly higher than that of patients without postoperative infection (P<0.001). While there was no statistically significant association between the variables of weight, smoking, surgical history, hypertension, CRP, ESR, surgical site, approach, and surgical method with postoperative infection (P>0.05).