Surgical Management of Aortic Valve Endocarditis: The High-Water Mark?

Abstract

Harnessing the enormous numeric power of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons Adult Cardiac Surgery Database (STS-ACSD), Caceres Polo and colleagues1 in this issue of The Annals of Thoracic Surgery have reviewed the data of nearly 10 000 patients treated surgically for aortic valve endocarditis. Over the last decade, surgical mortality has dramatically diminished from 22.5% to 10.4% for patients with prosthetic valve endocarditis and from 10.9% to 8.5% for patients with native valve endocarditis, changes that are both clinically and statistically significant.