Impact of a Multidisciplinary Approach on Surgical Site Infections (SSIs) in Pediatric Posterior Spine Fusions (PSF): Insights From a Ten-Year Cohort Study (2012-2022)

Description

Tyler Sullivan and colleagues reviewed a decade of pediatric posterior spine fusions at their institution to judge a long-running infection prevention program, in a 2026 cohort study covering 2012 to 2022. The review covered 1,476 patients aged ten to eighteen, split into low-risk patients, mostly scoliosis without other conditions, and high-risk patients carrying conditions such as cerebral palsy.

Infections remained stubbornly concentrated in the high-risk group: 6.87 percent of high-risk patients developed a surgical site infection against 0.92 percent of low-risk patients. Compared with the program's earlier cohort, low-risk infection rates fell from 2.7 percent to the current 0.92 percent figure, and protocol compliance climbed from 85 percent to 98 percent across groups. High-risk rates, though, sat essentially unchanged from the previous era's 6.5 percent. The authors conclude that standardized prevention has squeezed out most of the easy gains, leaving targeted new strategies for complex patients as the remaining frontier.

Catalog record

Source: https://europepmc.org/article/MED/PMC13400020