IMR Press / RCM / Volume 23 / Issue 1 / DOI: 10.31083/j.rcm2301015
Open Access Review
Bacteria and the growing threat of multidrug resistance for invasive cardiac interventions
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1 Department of Physiology and Pathophysiology, Rady Faculty of Health Sciences, Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences, Albrechtsen Research Centre, St. Boniface Hospital, Winnipeg, MB R2H 2A6, Canada
2 Department of Microbiology, Faculty of Science, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB R3T 2N2, Canada
3 Department of Internal Medicine, Rady Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB R3E 0W3, Canada
*Correspondence: gpierce@sbrc.ca (Grant N. Pierce)
Academic Editors: Morris Karmazyn and Victor L. Serebruany
Rev. Cardiovasc. Med. 2022, 23(1), 15; https://doi.org/10.31083/j.rcm2301015
Submitted: 5 October 2021 | Revised: 9 December 2021 | Accepted: 20 December 2021 | Published: 14 January 2022
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Highlighting Excellence in Cardiovascular Research in Canada)
Copyright: © 2022 The Author(s). Published by IMR Press.
This is an open access article under the CC BY 4.0 license.
Abstract

Invasive cardiovascular procedures which include heart transplantations, congenital heart surgery, coronary artery bypass grafts, cardiac valve repair and replacement, and interventional cardiac electrophysiology procedures represent common mechanisms to treat a variety of cardiovascular diseases across the globe. The majority of these invasive approaches employ antibiotics as a regular and obligatory feature of the invasive procedure. Although the growing incidence of bacterial resistance to currently used antibiotics threatens to curtail the use of all interventional surgical techniques, it remains an underappreciated threat within the arsenal of cardiovascular therapies. It is reasonable to expect that the continued overuse of antibiotics and the frequent management of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) infected patients with high doses of antibiotics will inevitably accentuate the rise of multidrug resistance. The purpose of this article is to heighten awareness of the role of bacterial infections in cardiovascular disease, the use of antibiotics in today’s cardiovascular surgical theaters, the threat facing cardiovascular surgery should multidrug resistance continue to rise unabated, and the development of new antibiotic platforms to solve this problem.

Keywords
Bacteria
Cardiovascular disease
Antibiotics
Surgery
Cardiovascular intervention
Multidrug resistance
COVID-19
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