Postoperative Infections After Craniotomy: A Prospective Study with Partial Hair Removal and the Use of Antiseptic Hair Gel and Perioperative Antibiotics

Surgical wound infections are still serious and sometimes fatal complications in neurosurgery [2, 4, 5, 9, 11, 17, 18, 21, 23]. Several investigations have, however, demonstrated a decrease in the rate of infection using perioperative antibiotic prophylaxis [3, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14, 15, 19, 22]. The conception of modern mieroneurosurgery that minimization of the operative trauma contributes to improvement in the postoperative outcome as well as psychological and cosmetic aspects leads to a minimization of hair removal [20]. In the context of these improvements this study evaluated the rate of infection by using a standardized method with minimal partial hair removal in the incision line [16], antiseptic hair gel, and perioperative antibiotics in 716 craniotomies.