Foot abscesses with no accompanying wound: clinical presentation and pathogens.

INTRODUCTION: Acute bacterial infections of the skin and soft tissue are common and often pose serious complications, most commonly caused by Streptococcus species and Staphylococcus aureus. OBJECTIVE: The authors report clinical presentation and pathogens in patients with a foot abscess and no wound. METHODS: The authors retrospectively evaluated the demographics, clinical presentation, and microbiology from 20 patient records. RESULTS: Twenty patients were identified. Fifteen were male (75%), and 10 patients (50%) had DM. Patients presented to the hospital 7.8 ± 4.8 days after onset of symptoms and underwent surgery 2.0 ± 0.9 days from admission. Patients underwent 2.4 ± 1.0 surgeries while admitted. Patients with DM presented with significantly higher erythrocyte sedimentation rate than patients without DM (66.6 ± 46.1 vs 43.3 ± 26.2; P = .02). There were no polymicrobial infections based on deep intraoperative tissue cultures. Seven patients had methicillin-sensitive S aureus (35%), 4 had Streptococcus agalactiae (20%), 3 had methicillin-resistant S aureus (15%), 1 had Streptococcus pyogenes (5%), 1 had Escherichia coli (5%), 1 had Streptococcus dysgalactiae (5%), 1 had an unidentified Streptococcus species (5%), and 2 had no growth (10%). CONCLUSION: Patients with foot abscess and no wounds had single-pathogen infections, predominantly Staphylococcus and Streptococcus.

A Critical Look at a Diabetic Foot Randomized Controlled Trial: Can You Ever Have Too Many Patients?

The objective of this article series is to teach approaches for critical appraisal to consumers of medical literature. The aim is to build a deeper understanding of standard procedure in clinical research so clinicians can determine whether medical evidence can be applied to their practices. We will choose published articles with methodological flaws to serve as discussion points. In the first article of this series, we will proceed section by section through an article to teach readers what is usually reported, and illustrate what was done correctly and what was not. Subsequently, later articles in this series of critical appraisals will discuss more focused topics. There were several interesting flaws in our first examined paper. This study provides the unusual flaw of reporting a sample size justification and then exceeding enrollment. In addition, the authors enrolled a relatively large number of subjects (n = 16) that evidently completed the study but were subsequently excluded from analysis because they did not fit the inclusion and exclusion criteria.