Routine Perioperative Antibiotic Prophylaxis in Renal Transplantation: It Makes No Difference for Bacterial Infections

Background: Although it has been a popular practice to use preventative antibiotics for the kidney recipients, it could increase the cost, encourage the growth of resistant micro-organism and have adverse effects. There has been no reported concrete evidence about the benefits and risks of using peri-operative prophylactic antibiotics for an immunosuppressed population. Therefore, we retrospectively evaluated the differences in the incidences of bacterial infection and adverse events after transplant surgery according to using peri-operative prophylactic antibiotics. Methods: We reviewed retrospectively 106 cases of renal transplantations (cadaver donor: 42 cases, living donor: 64 cases) that were performed at Ajou University Hospital, Korea from January, 2006 to December, 2008. We divided the cases into two groups: Group A (n=41; 38.7%) included the patients who did not receive prophylactic antibiotics and Group B (n= 65; 61.3%) included the patients who did receive prophylactic antibiotics. We analyzed the infectious complications that occurred within 1 month after renal transplantation. Results: In Group A, most patients (62 cases, 95.3%) used a 1 generation cephalosporin. The incidence of wound infection after kidney transplant for the 65 patients who received prophylactic antibiotics was 1.5%, compared to 2.5% for the 41 patients who did not receive prophylactic antibiotics. Conclusions: This retrospective study could not demonstrate a statistically significant difference in the rates of infectious complications between the two groups, although renal transplantation is considered to be a clean-contaminated surgery. But in order to obtain a definite conclusion, we need a bigger cohort in a prospective study.