• Helen Maye, Francesca Colombo, Eva Bourama, James Balogun, Konstantina Karabatsou, David Coope, Matthew Bailey, Mueez Waqar, and Pietro I D'Urso.
• Department of Neurosurgery, Manchester Centre for Clinical Neurosciences, Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust, Manchester, UK. Electronic address: helenmaye@live.co.uk.
• World Neurosurg. 2022 Jun 1; 162: e246-e250.

BackgroundSurgical site infection (SSI) is a significant cause of postoperative morbidity and mortality. As oncologic care advances, the use of surgical adjuncts such as intraoperative ultrasound (US), 5-aminolevulinic acid (5-ALA), and neurophysiologic monitoring has increased. This study set out to identify whether the use of surgical adjuncts in supratentorial tumor surgery lead to increased operative time or increased rates of SSI.MethodsThis is a retrospective study at a large tertiary clinical neurosciences center in the UK. We included all patients who underwent an elective supratentorial craniotomy for a tumor over a 12 month period. We retrospectively assessed whether patients had had a postoperative infection at 30 days or 4 months using our electronic patient record system.ResultsA total of 267 patients were included. The median age was 58 years (range: 17-87 years) with roughly equal numbers of men and women (men: 138 of 267, 52%). Most operations were carried out for gliomas (149 of 267, 56%) or metastases (61 of 267, 23%). The median length of surgery was 3 hours 6 minutes, with 24% lasting >4 hours. The overall infection rate was 4.5%. Intraoperative monitoring and 5-ALA was associated with longer operative times although not necessarily larger craniotomy sizes, whereas intraoperative US was associated with a shorter operative time and smaller craniotomy size. These adjuncts were not associated with an increased risk of infection.ConclusionsThis study adds reassurance that although some surgical adjuncts lead to increased operative times, in our study there was no apparent increased risk of infection as a result of this.Copyright © 2022. Published by Elsevier Inc.

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