Elsevier

Annals of Vascular Surgery

Volume 21, Issue 2, March–April 2007, Pages 137-142
Annals of Vascular Surgery

Papers Presented to the Southern California Vascular Surgical Society
Management of an Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm Infected with Campylobacter Fetus: A Case Report

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avsg.2007.01.002Get rights and content

We present a rare case of an abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) infected with Campylobacter fetus. The patient presented with abdominal pain and leukocytosis, without a palpable AAA. Computed tomography (CT) of the abdomen showed a 3.1 × 3.0 cm infrarenal abdominal aneurysm with an extra-aortic fluid collection. At surgery, an in situ graft was placed. Intraoperative aortic wall cultures grew pansensitive C. fetus, and blood cultures remained negative. At 9-month follow-up, the patient was doing well without complaints. To our knowledge, this represents only the ninth reported case of an AAA with an aortic wall culture positive for C. fetus.

Section snippets

Case Report

The patient was a 78-year-old African American male with a history of hyperlipidemia and chronic prostatitis who presented to the emergency department complaining of 5 days of abdominal pain associated with episodes of nonbilious, nonbloody emesis. The pain was described as a nonradiating, pressure-like sensation in the mid-abdomen. Of note, the patient had been seen 2 days prior in the emergency department for prostatitis and a urethral stricture with a urinary tract infection. At that time,

Discussion

The term mycotic aneurysm was first coined by William Osler in 1885, who described a 30-year-old man who died after developing four aortic arch aneurysms secondary to endocarditis.6, 7 The term is misleading since the majority of mycotic aneurysms are due to bacterial infection and are not fungal in nature.8 In most cases, culture of the arterial wall is positive for bacterial organisms. This is in contrast to inflammatory aneurysms, which are culture-negative.9

The most commonly cultured

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  • Cited by (6)

    • Mycotic abdominal aortic aneurysm caused by campylobacter fetus: A case report and literature review

      2014, Annals of Vascular Surgery
      Citation Excerpt :

      Actually, in our patient, we could recall MAAA as a potential diagnosis at the beginning of the clinical course because of typical CT findings with a high inflammatory serum state. We searched for previous cases of C. fetus–associated MAAA in PubMed, and results of 28 cases including our case are summarized in Table I.8,9,11,19–34 The average age of the patients was 68 years (54–84 years).

    • Aortoiliac aneurysms infected by Campylobacter fetus

      2008, Journal of Vascular Surgery
      Citation Excerpt :

      It is responsible for serious infections in elderly or immunosuppressed patients20 and has been associated with relapsing bacteremia,21 endocarditis,22 pericarditis,23 thrombophlebitis,24 meningitidis,25 arthritis,26 osteomyelitis,27 cellulitis,28 pneumonia,29 and mycotic aneurysms.30 However, involvement of C fetus in infected aortic aneurysms is rare, and to the best of our knowledge, only 15 cases have been previously published in English.3-17 Until a few years ago, C fetus infections were probably underdiagnosed.

    Presented at the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Southern California Vascular Surgical Society, La Quinta, California, May 13-15, 2005.

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