TREATMENT
Review: central venous catheters treated with anti-infective agents prevent catheter-related bloodstream infections
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Do central venous catheters treated with anti-infective agents (AI-CVCs) prevent catheter-related bloodstream infections (CRBSIs)?
Included studies compared AI-CVCs with standard CVCs or a different AI-CVC for preventing CRBSIs in patients requiring a CVC. Primary outcome was diagnosis of a CRBSI (the same micro-organism identified in both the catheter and the bloodstream).
Medline, EMBASE/Excerpta Medica, SCI/Web of Science, SCI/ISI Proceedings, and Cochrane Library (to Sep 2007) were searched for randomised controlled trials (RCTs). Trials involving AI-CVCs that required in-house preparation were excluded. 38 RCTs (n = 
9000 patients) met the selection criteria. Methodological quality of the trials was generally poor: 10 RCTs reported adequate concealment of allocation, and 19 RCTs reported blinding of patients, healthcare providers, or outcome assessors. 27 trials that reported appropriate measures of CRBSI were included in the meta-analysis. 6 trials compared 2 different AI-CVCs, but results were not reported in this paper.*
AI-CVCs reduced risk of CRBSI
Academic Medical Centre, University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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