Research Article External Ventricular Drain Infections: Risk Factors and Outcome

Copyright © 2014 S. Hagel et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. External ventricular drainage (EVD) is frequently used in neurosurgery to drain cerebrospinal fluid in patients with raised intracranial pressure.We performed a retrospective single center study in order to evaluate the incidence of EVD-related infections and to identify underlying risk factors. 246 EVDswere placed in 218 patients over a 30-month period. EVDwas continued inmedian for 7 days (range 1–44). The cumulative incidence of EVD-related infections was 8.3 % (95 % CI, 5.3–12.7) with a device-associated infection rate of 10.4 per 1000 drainage days (95 % CI, 6.2–16.5). The pathogens most commonly identified were coagulase-negative Staphylococcus (62%) followed by Enterococcus spp. (19%). Patients with an EVD-related infection had a significantly longer ICU (11 versus 21 days