Journal of Clinical Medicine

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Dear Colleagues,

I am pleased to invite you to contribute to this Special Issue entitled “Clinical Challenges in Endocarditis—2nd Edition”. For more details on the first volume, in which we published four papers, please visit
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/jcm/special_issues/Clinical_Endocarditis

Infectious endocarditis (IE) is a fatal and debilitating disease, and has been a growing problem in the last decade. It is estimated that IE affects 3–7.5 people per 100,000 person years, and its incidence is reported to be increasing in some parts of the world. IE more frequently affects men of around 60 years of age, with staphylococcal and enterococcal IE being the most frequent. Oral streptococcal endocarditis is less frequent, and its incidence has not increased since the implementation of the 2009 and 2015 recommendations restricting indications for antibiotic prophylaxis. There has been considerable focus on new methods of early diagnosis, such as PET or CT scans, which are now used in several countries. The prognosis of IE is still unacceptably poor, and more aggressive management of this deadly disease remains necessary. For this Special Issue, we encourage the submission of studies that investigate clinical challenges involving IE.

Dr. Antonio Salsano
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Journal of Clinical Medicine is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Related Special Issue

Published Papers (1 paper)

Research

10 pages, 398 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Performance of Risk Scores in Predicting Infective Endocarditis in Patients with Staphylococcus aureus Bacteraemia in a Prospective Asian Cohort

by Jinghao Nicholas Ngiam, Matthew Chung Yi Koh, Sophia Archuleta, Dale Fisher, Louis Yi-Ann Chai, Ching-Hui Sia, William K. F. Kong and Paul Anantharajah Tambyah

J. Clin. Med. 2024, 13(10), 2947; https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm13102947 - 16 May 2024

Viewed by 262

Abstract

Background: Several risk scores have been derived to predict the risk of infective endocarditis (IE) amongst patients with Staphylococcus aureus bacteraemia (SAB), which helps to guide clinical management. Methods: We prospectively studied 634 patients admitted with SAB. The cohort was stratified into those with or without IE, and the PREDICT Day 1, Day 5 and VIRSTA scores were tabulated. Area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUC) curves were constructed to compare the performance of each score. Results: Of the 634 patients examined, 36 (5.7%) had IE. These patients were younger (51.6 ± 20.1 vs. 59.2 ± 18.0 years, p = 0.015), tended to have community acquisition of bacteraemia (41.7% vs. 17.9%, p < 0.001), and had persistent bacteraemia beyond 72 h (19.4% vs. 6.0%, p = 0.002). The VIRSTA score had the best performance in predicting IE (AUC 0.76, 95%CI 0.66–0.86) compared with PREDICT Day 1 and Day 5. A VIRSTA score of <3 had the best negative predictive value (97.5%), compared with PREDICT Day 1 (<4) and Day 5 (<2) (94.3% and 96.6%, respectively). Conclusions: Overall, the risk scores performed well in our Asian cohort. If applied, 23.5% of the cohort with a VIRSTA ≥ 3 would require TEE, and a score of <3 had an excellent negative predictive value. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Clinical Challenges in Endocarditis—2nd Edition)

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