Infective Endocarditis Surgery Using Conventional Prosthetic Valves Versus Cryopreserved Aortic Homograft

: Evidence suggested that autologous or allogeneic tissue is more suitable to synthetic material in an infected field. Given the unwillingness of some surgeons to use artificial foreign materials, such as conventional mechanical or stent xenograft valve prostheses, cryopreserved aortic homografts (CAH) have been recommended revealing favorable outcomes in aortic valve endocarditis (AVE) surgery (1-5). This aspect is even more evident in cases involving prosthetic valve endocarditis (PVE) and other complex and aggressive lesions involving the aortic root and intervalvular fibrosa with abscess formation. However, most of these reports are fixed on single-arm observational studies without comparing CAH with conventional prostheses. The key question of this study is to establish the difference in treatment failure (death, recurrent aortic valve regurgitation and reoperation), all-cause and cause-specific (cardiac vs noncardiac) mortality, hospitalizations for heart failure during follow-up (structural/non structural valve deterioration, thromboembolism and recurrent endocarditis) in patients who received the CAH vs conventional mechanical or stent xenograft valve prostheses for aortic valve replacement (AVR) secondary to infective endocarditis (IE)