Erosion of Cardiovascular Implantable Device: Conservative Therapy or Extraction?

The standard of care for device infection is normally a complete removal of the implantable system, including lead extraction in local or systemic infection cases. Despite the importance of lead extraction techniques, these techniques are complex and have some major risks. Success rates were high, but they are less favorable in patients with several comorbidities. An 80-year-old male presented for device erosion. The patient is known to have several cardiac comorbidities: a transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR), mitral clips for severe aortic stenosis, mitral regurgitation, dual-chamber implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICD) for secondary prevention. Several weeks ago, he noted tenderness and redness at the site of his device pocket, and his physician, after checking his wound, suggested a possible skin irritation with no systemic infection and started antibiotics treatment. Two weeks later, he noted thinning of the skin around the device with a hematoma and ecchymosis, and slight skin erosion. Strategies for assessment of the wound and pocket cleaning were taken. The strategy was to remove the left-sided device and keep the leads since the patient lately has no elevated inflammatory labs, negative cultures, no fever, nor signs of vegetation on transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) and refused any additional examination as positron emission tomography (PET) scan, and reimplant a new system on the contralateral side. The procedure was divided into two sequences: extracting the device and after one-week implantation of a right-sided new system. In this case, chronic antibiotics were discussable to decrease the recurrence rate, but they did increase the severity of the patient's thrombocytopenia. Despite extraction being the gold standard of treatment in most cases of devices with local and systemic infection, there are some frail patients with several comorbidities where extraction is unbearable due to its major risks and complex procedure. In these specific cases with local infection and device erosion with no signs of any systemic infection, conservative therapy could be a viable option.