Traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) have a significant global health impact. Despite emergency craniotomy’s potential for life-saving intervention, it often introduces the risk of postoperative complications like infections. Complications such as surgical site infections, meningitis, ventriculitis, and bloodstream infections can extend hospital stays, escalate healthcare costs, and increase mortality rates, thus necessitating a comprehensive understanding of risk factors.
This research is a retrospective cohort study conducted at the Brain Hospital of Hunan Province, focusing on severe TBI patients who underwent emergency craniotomy between December 2019 and December 2021. The study included 312 patients; among these, 57 (or approximately 18.3%) developed postoperative infections. Data analysis revealed several significant risk factors, including older age, protracted surgery duration, the presence of preoperative infection, and lower Glasgow Coma Scale scores.
The study concludes that by identifying patients at high risk for postoperative infections, it’s possible to guide preventive measures and improve outcomes for severe TBI patients requiring emergency craniotomy. Univariate and multivariate logistic regression analyses were employed to assess the variables contributing to postoperative infections. The unique physiological traits, combined with the severe TBI patients’ necessity for urgent surgery, may impact infection risks differently from other surgical populations.
The narrow focus on TBI related to emergency craniotomy underscores the need for robust preoperative infection control strategies, including the importance of identifying high-risk patients and understanding modifiable risk factors for postoperative infections. To enhance postoperative patient outcomes, it is essential to improve perioperative infection prevention protocols, optimize surgical duration, manage preoperative infections effectively, and tailor postoperative monitoring.
Finally, the cohort study performed statistical analysis systematically to identify significant risk factors for postoperative infections. Variables demonstrating a statistically significant association with postoperative infections in univariate analysis were included in multivariate logistic regression analysis to determine independent risk factors. The study was sufficiently powered at 80% to detect a moderate effect size of 0.5, ensuring the reliability of results. Because the research is based on a rigorous analytical approach, it may provide vital information and potentially influence future care strategies for severe TBI patients who undergo emergency craniotomy.