Patients with sternal wound infection after cardiac surgery do not improve their quality of life.

Objectives: Sternal wound infection after cardiac operations leave physical, cosmetic and mental scar i.e. low quality of life (QoL). To better understand and evaluate health related to QoL we used SF-36 and also analysed if there were any different outcome in SWI subgroups due to different surgical techniques.

Design: Between January 1, 1998 and June 30, 2002 a total of 97 patients developed SWI at our department. The patients were followed up in terms of survival by computerised linkage to a continuously updated population register. On January 1, 2003, 84 patients could be identified as being alive and constituted the study group (SWI group) and compared with 42 patients prior to coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) and evaluated one year postoperative (CABG group), and matched for time of the operation, age and sex.

Results: The median follow-up time after cardiac surgery was 20 months (range 7-40). Late mortality was 13.4% (13/97 patients) with the median time of 5 months (range 0.5-26) postoperative. The response rate was 86.9% and SF-36 showed that SWI patients deviated significantly from the normative data for the general Swedish population. QoL for the SWI patients was comparable to QoL assessed prior to cardiac surgery i.e. the CABG group. The different surgical techniques used were comparable as they did not affect the outcome of QoL.

Conclusions: Our results confirm that if the patients survive, SWI is a very serious complication concerning QoL. At follow up the SWI patients did not improve their QoL, with no difference in surgical technique used, although they had undergone open heart surgery.