Dear Colleagues

ID-IRI study analyzing infective endocarditis has been accepted for publication in European Journal of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases. The data came from referral centers in 13  countries.

The idea behind this survey was to provide one of the largest patient databases ever provided in the literature and to picture the current status of endocardial infections as a snapshot tool. To prevent confusion and to provide more robust data we excluded probable endocarditis patients and included definitive endocarditis patients solely. On the whole, we analyzed 867 cases with definitive endocarditis and we believe this is a huge number.

The paper delineates in detail the epidemiology/microbiology/histopathology of infective endocarditis, the extents and types of complications particularly the embolic patterns and suppurative complications, underlying disorders with special emphasis on cardiac parameters, the differences between PVE and NVE cases. Furthermore, the manuscript also mentions outcome parameters. Finally, we wanted to delineate the impacts and contributions of diagnostic parameters (Vascular and immunological phenomena, microbiological or radiological data) in due course of diagnostic courses.

We hope that this study will provide a general understanding of infective endocarditis and will help decision making by optimizing clinical approaches both to infectious diseases physicians and the cardiologists worldwide with its current presentation. As you kindly appreciate robust inferences could only be made through huge patient databases. Thanks to the contributors once again.