Can Prophylactic Antibiotics Help Reduce The Risk Of Infection During Surgery?
Podiatric surgery can carry inherent risks including the possibility of perioperative infection. A recent article in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (JBJS) offers several pertinent recommendations that aim to prevent some of the reported 780,000 surgical site infections that occur every year in the United States, according to the study authors. Although they acknowledge that preoperative antibiotics are associated with lower rates of surgical site infections, the authors of the JBJS article say surgeons should continue antibiotics for no more than 24 hours after elective surgery of surgical treatment of closed fractures. The article also contends chlorhexidine gluconate is superior to povidone-iodine when it comes to preoperative antisepsis. However, in regard to prophylactic antibiotics, Gary Jolly, DPM, notes “the evidence does not show that their use in elective foot and ankle surgery reduces the risk of infection despite a fairly strong trend to use prophylactic antibiotics.”
