Wound infection rate after skin closure of damage control laparotomy with wicks or incisional negative wound therapy: An EAST multi-center trial.

Damage control laparotomy (DCL) has a high risk of SSI and as an attempt to mitigate this, surgeons often leave the skin open to heal by secondary intention. A recent retrospective study showed that DCL wounds could be closed with the addition of wicks or incisional wound vacs with acceptable rates of wound infection. The aim of this prospective trial was to corroborate these results. This is a prospective multicenter observational trial performed by 7 institutions from July 2020 to April 2022. Adult patients who underwent DCL and fascia/skin closure with the addition of wicks or an incisional wound vac were included. Patients who died within seven days of DCL were excluded. Demographics, mechanism of initial presentation, wound classification, antibiotics given, surgical site infections, procedures performed, and mortality data was collected. Fisher's Exact test was used for categorical data and Wilcoxon Rank Sum test for continuous data. Mean days to closure was assessed using Student's t-test for independent groups. P-values <0.05 were considered indicative of statistical significance. Over the 21-month period, a total of 119 patients analyzed. Most patients were male (n = 66, 63 %), and the average age was 51 years. The average number of days the abdomen was kept open was 2.6. A majority of the DCLs were performed on acute care patients (n = 76, 63.8 %) and 92 patients (77.3 %) had a wound classification of contaminated or dirty. Most of the patients' skin was closed with wicks in place (68.9 %). There was a 9.8 % infection rate in patient's skin closed with wicks versus 16.2 % closed with an incisional wound vac (p = 0.361). Although the wick group had a higher proportion of class III and IV wound types, patients primarily treated with wicks had a lower risk of wound infection compared to those treated with incisional wound VACs; however, this difference was not statistically significant.