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Letters to the Editor

Reply to Acar Early surgery in active valve endocarditis

Division of Cardiothoracic and Vascular Surgery, Université Catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium

Received 22 August 2007; accepted 24 August 2007.

^_* Corresponding author. Address: Division of Cardiothoracic and Vascular Surgery, Cliniques Universitaires Saint-Luc, Avenue Hippocrate 10, 1200 Brussels, Belgium. Tel.: +32 2 764 6111; fax: +32 2 764 8960. (Email: Laurent.DeKerchove@clin.ucl.ac.be).

Key Words: Endocarditis • Surgery • Mitral repair

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

We thank Dr Acar for his thoughtful comments [1] on our recently published work focusing on mitral valve (MV) repair for active infective endocarditis (IE) [2]. Dr Acar has suggested that an early surgical approach could blind the potential eradication successes of medical treatment alone and believes that repair is easier during the healed phase of IE than during the active one. Effectively, our current approach is to operate on patients with active IE very early during the course of the disease, even after only a few days of antibiotic therapy.

Herein, we insist on the fact that if we had operated on the patient earlier compared to our historical controls, we have not broadened the classical indications for . . . [Full Text of this Article]