Strategies for Prevention of Surgical Site Infection in Patients With CIED Implantation: A Literature Review

In the last several years a stable increase in cardiovascular implantable electronic device (CIED) implantation has been seen, mainly because of the expanded indications for their usage. An important complication of CIED implantation is possible postprocedural infection (pocket or systemic), which is connected with high morbidity and mortality rates and carries a significant financial cost to the health systems. Although this complication is not that frequent (ranging from 1% to over 5% in different studies), it is associated with a significant burden to patients, clinicians, and the healthcare system and because of that attention should be placed on the prevention of the infection. In this article, we collected and summarized the information and data available, directly related to the problem of prevention of CIED infection. The results of different studies and guidelines, regarding prevention with antibiotics, antiseptics, and the usage of antibacterial envelopes are analyzed. Perspective is put on the new technology of using antibacterial envelopes for prevention of infections. The aim of this paper is to review the various infection prevention techniques and to highlight the most beneficial ones according to guidelines and worldwide studies.