Preoperative characteristics
Twenty patients underwent a redo aortic procedure (66% of the entire population). The remaining ten patients had conservative treatment which was proposed based on sepsis control in absence of heart failure and local complications in six patients, haemorrhagic cerebral stroke in 1 patients, ischaemic cerebral stroke in 1 case, bilateral pneumonia in 1 patient, high surgical risk due to multiple comorbidities in a 82-year old patient.
Table 1 details about preoperative characteristics and presentation of the two groups of patients. Previous procedures details are shown in Table 2.
At the reoperation, presence of vegetations was confirmed in 10 patients, in 14 cases there was a periannular abscess and 6 patients presented detachment of the aortic conduit from the left ventricle outflow tract. In patients who had medical management vegetations were described in 7 cases (70%) and periannular abscess in 3 cases (30%). None of the patients who underwent conservative treatment presented aorto-ventricular discontinuity at the admission.
Details about blood and tissue cultures results for the two groups are shown in Table 3.