Time to and differential time to blood culture positivity for assessing catheter-related yeast fungaemia: A longitudinal, 7-year study in a single university hospital

Background: Time to positivity (TTP) and differential time to positivity (DTTP) between central and peripheral blood cultures are commonly used for bacteraemia to evaluate the likelihood of central venous catheter (CVC)-related bloodstream infection. Few studies have addressed these approaches to yeast fungaemia.

Objectives: This study aimed to evaluate TTP and DTTP to assess CVC-related yeast fungaemia (CVC-RYF).

Patients/methods: We retrospectively analysed the results from 105 adult patients with incident fungaemia, with CVC removed and cultured, collected from 2010 to 2017. The bottles were incubated in a BioMérieux BacT/ALERT 3D and kept for at least 5 days.

Results: Of the 105 patients included, most were oncology patients (85.7%) and had of long-term CVC (79.6%); 32 (30.5%) had a culture-positive CVC (defined as CVC-RYF) with the same species as in blood culture, and 69.5% had culture-negative CVC (defined as non-CVC-RYF, NCVC-RYF). Candida albicans represented 46% of the episodes. The median TTP was statistically different between CVC-RYF and NCVC-RYF (16.8 hours interquartile range (IQR) [9.7-28.6] vs 29.4 hours [IQR 20.7-41.3]; P = .001). A TTP <10 hours had the best positive likelihood ratio (21.5) for CVC-RYF, although the sensitivity was only 28%. DTTP was available for 52 patients. A DTTP >5 hours had a sensitivity of 100% and a specificity of 71% for CVC-RYF.

Conclusions: Since the median TTP was 17 hours and the most performing DTTP >5 hours, these delays are too long to take a decision in the same operational day. More rapid methods for detecting infected catheters should be tested to avoid unnecessary CVC withdrawal.