Total joint arthroplasty is the recommended treatment for patients with end-stage osteoarthritis, as it reduces disability and pain and restores joint function. However, prosthetic joint infection is a serious complication of this procedure, with the two-stage exchange being the most common treatment method. While there is consensus on diagnosing prosthetic joint infection, there is a lack of agreement on the parameters that can guide the surgeon in performing definitive reimplantation in a two-stage procedure. One approach that has been suggested to improve the accuracy of microbiologic investigations before definitive reimplantation is to observe a holiday period from antibiotic therapy to improve the accuracy of cultures from periprosthetic tissues, but these cultures report some degree of aspecificity. Therefore, several pieces of evidence highlight that performing reimplantation using continuous antibiotic therapy should be considered a safe and effective approach, leading to higher cure rates and a shorter period of disability. Dosage of C-reactive protein (CRP), erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ERS) and D-dimer are helpful in diagnosing prosthetic joint infection, but only D-dimer has shown sufficient accuracy in predicting the risk of infection recurrence after a two-stage procedure. Synovial fluid analysis before reimplantation has been shown to be the most accurate in predicting recurrence, and new cutoff values for leukocyte count and neutrophil percentage have shown a useful predictive rule to identify patients at risk of unfavourable outcome. A new scoring system based on a numerical score calculated from the beta coefficient derived through multivariate analysis of D-dimer levels, synovial fluid leukocytes and relative neutrophils percentage has demonstrated high accuracy when it comes to guiding the second step of two-stage procedure. In conclusion, reimplantation may be a suitable option for patients who are on continuous therapy without local symptoms, and with CRP and ERS within the normal range, with low synovial fluid leukocytes (< 952/mL) and a low relative neutrophil percentage (< 52%) and D-dimer below 1100 µg/mL. A numerical score derived from analysing these three parameters can serve as a valuable tool in determining the feasibility of reimplantation in these patients.
Keywords: D-dimer; Prosthetic joint infection; Reimplantation; Scoring system; Synovial fluid examination; Two-stage.
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