Retrospective Cohort Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2024. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Cardiol. Jun 26, 2024; 16(6): 318-328
Published online Jun 26, 2024. doi: 10.4330/wjc.v16.i6.318
Echocardiographic predictors and associated outcomes of multiple vegetations in infective endocarditis: A pilot study
Ajay Kumar Mishra, Kannu Bansal, Ibragim Al-Seykal, Pradnya B Bhattad, Anu Anna George, Anil Jha, Nitish Sharma, Jennifer Sargent, Mark J Kranis
Ajay Kumar Mishra, Pradnya B Bhattad, Anil Jha, Nitish Sharma, Division of Cardiology, Saint Vincent Hospital, Worcester, MA 01608, United States
Kannu Bansal, Anu Anna George, Jennifer Sargent, Department of Internal Medicine, Saint Vincent Hospital, Worcester, MA 01608, United States
Ibragim Al-Seykal, Department of Medicine, Division of Cardiology, Saint Vincent Hospital, Worcester, MA 01608, United States
Mark J Kranis, Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, Saint Vincent Hospital, Worcester, MA 01608, United States
Author contributions: Mishra AK and Jha A planned and formulated the study; Al-Seykal I, Bhattad PB, and George AA collected and analyzed the data; Mishra AK, Bansal K, George AA, and Jha A completed the manuscript; Mishra AK, Sharma N, Sargent J, and Kranis MJ reviewed the manuscript; Kranis MJ approved the manuscript.
Institutional review board statement: This protocol was developed, reviewed, and sanctioned by the joint institutional review board at MetroWest Medical Center under Approval No. 2019-171.
Informed consent statement: The ethical requirement for individual informed consent was appropriately waived by the institutional review board due to the retrospective nature of this study.
Conflict-of-interest statement: All the authors report no relevant conflicts of interest for this article.
Data sharing statement: No additional data are available.
STROBE statement: The authors have read the STROBE Statement-checklist of items, and the manuscript was prepared and revised according to the STROBE Statement-checklist of items.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: https://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Ajay Kumar Mishra, MD, Academic Fellow, Division of Cardiology, Saint Vincent Hospital, 123 Summer Street, Worcester, MA 01608, United States. ajaybalasore@gmail.com
Received: February 4, 2024
Revised: April 27, 2024
Accepted: May 15, 2024
Published online: June 26, 2024
Processing time: 141 Days and 16.3 Hours
Core Tip

Core Tip: Embolic events occur in up to 80% of patients with infective endocarditis (IE). Vegetations of > 10 mm in size are associated with increased embolic events and poor prognosis. In this retrospective cohort study, patients diagnosed with IE were recruited over 2 years. 34% of these had multiple vegetations. Echocardiographic features of moderate to severe regurgitation, presence of pacemaker lead, impaired left ventricle relaxation, and elevated pulmonary artery systolic pressure were associated with higher odds of multiple vegetation and outcomes including recurrent admissions and device removal were found to be associated with multiple vegetations.