Influence of patient characteristics on microbial composition in surgical-site infections: insights from national surveillance study.

Peisl, Sarah; Guillen Ramirez, Hugo; Sánchez-Taltavull, Daniel; Widmer, Andreas; Sommerstein, Rami; Beldi, Guido Jakob Friedrich (2024). Influence of patient characteristics on microbial composition in surgical-site infections: insights from national surveillance study. British journal of surgery, 111(6) Oxford University Press 10.1093/bjs/znae138

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BACKGROUND

Although the impact of surgery- and patient-dependent factors on surgical-site infections (SSIs) have been studied extensively, their influence on the microbial composition of SSI remains unexplored. The aim of this study was to identify patient-dependent predictors of the microbial composition of SSIs across different types of surgery.

METHODS

This retrospective cohort study included 538 893 patients from the Swiss national infection surveillance programme. Multilabel classification methods, adaptive boosting and Gaussian Naive Bayes were employed to identify predictors of the microbial composition of SSIs using 20 features, including sex, age, BMI, duration of surgery, type of surgery, and surgical antimicrobial prophylaxis.

RESULTS

Overall, SSIs were recorded in 18 642 patients (3.8%) and, of these, 10 632 had microbiological wound swabs available. The most common pathogens identified in SSIs were Enterobacterales (57%), Staphylococcus spp. (31%), and Enterococcus spp. (28%). Age (mean feature importance 0.260, 95% c.i. 0.209 to 0.309), BMI (0.224, 0.177 to 0.271), and duration of surgery (0.221, 0.180 to 0.269) were strong and independent predictors of the microbial composition of SSIs. Increasing age and duration of surgical procedure as well as decreasing BMI were associated with a shift from Staphylococcus spp. to Enterobacterales and Enterococcus spp. An online application of the machine learning model is available for validation in other healthcare systems.

CONCLUSION

Age, BMI, and duration of surgery were key predictors of the microbial composition of SSI, irrespective of the type of surgery, demonstrating the relevance of patient-dependent factors to the pathogenesis of SSIs.

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