Topical Vancomycin for Neurosurgery Wound Prophylaxis (Vanguard)

Surgical-site infections (SSIs) occur in up to 500,000 patients per year in the United States. Patients with SSIs require significantly longer hospital stays and higher health care expenditures. In fact, it is estimated that SSIs are responsible for almost 4 million excess hospital days and billions of dollars in added hospital charges every year. Additionally, SSIs are a significant source of morbidity and mortality for surgical patients. Thus, prompt and definitive measures are necessary in order to redress this significant public health concern. Over the past few decades, the implementation of a number of preventative measures-including improved techniques in pre-operative skin antisepsis and antibiotic prophylaxis-have led to significant reductions in the rate of SSIs. Studies have demonstrated that approximately half of all SSIs are preventable with the proper use of prophylactic antibiotics. Despite these dramatic improvements, SSIs remain a tremendous burden on the healthcare system. Our unpublished analysis of the National Inpatient Sample (NIS) in 2010 identified 117,000 craniotomies with a 2.4% rate of infection and 1.37% rate of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)-associated infection. Extrapolating to the full national population, there were 585,000 craniotomies and 14,040 post-operative infections. Published series report the rate of infection in intracranial neurosurgery to range from 1% to as high as 11%. This rate varies depending on the presence of hardware, prior radiotherapy, procedure duration, re-operation, and the presence of a CSF leak. The 30-day outcome associated with SSI following craniotomy was recently reported to be a minor disability in 12.8%, major disability in 7.7% and death in 5.1%. The financial burden of nosocomial infection in neurosurgery makes up a disproportionate component of the total national cost burden. A study of nosocomial infection in the US in 1995 estimated a per-patient cost of $2100 and a total cost of $4.5 billion while a recent British study focusing on post-craniotomy SSI identified a per-SSI cost of £9283, or $14,166. Given the tremendous potential for lifelong morbidity and mortality as a result of cranial SSIs, further reductions in the rate of SSI would be essential for the benefit of neurosurgical patients, as well as for the healthcare system as a whole.Topical formulations of vancomycin offer the possibility of direct application to the surgical wound, with minimal additional systemic drug exposure. Adjunctive vancomycin powder applied topically to surgical wound edges has been shown to significantly lower the SSI rate in both cardiothoracic surgery and spinal surgery. Importantly, laboratory analyses of blood and wound drainage samples from patients treated with vancomycin powder have demonstrated high vancomycin concentrations in the surgical wound, and simultaneously low drug concentrations in the peripheral blood, thereby confirming minimal systemic absorption in the setting of enhanced protection of the surgical site. Furthermore, there have been no reports of an increased rate of drug-related complications with the addition of vancomycin powder to standard antibiotic prophylaxis regimens.