Retrospective Clinical and Microbiologic Analysis of Patients with Anorectal Abscess

We conducted a clinical and microbiologic analysis of patients presenting with anorectal abscess.

A total of 505 adult patients presenting from January 2011 to December 2017 were analyzed retrospectively. Microbiologic data were available for 211 patients.

The mean age at presentation was 39.5 (standard deviation 12.4) years, and 81.4% of the cohort were men. One hundred fifteen patients (22.8%) had diabetes mellitus, and 15 patients (3.0%) had inflammatory bowel disease. There were 184 patients (36.4%) who required admission for more than 24 hours with a median length of stay of two days (interquartile range 2, 4) days. The most common microorganism was Escherichia coli (37.6%), followed by Bacteroides spp. (13.2%) and Streptococcus spp. (13.2%). Escherichia coli accounted for 34.9% of the microorganisms cultured from patients with diabetes mellitus followed by Streptococcus spp. (27%) and Klebsiella pneumoniae (20.6%).

Escherichia coli is the most common micro-organism cultured from patients presenting with anorectal abscess. Despite an increase in community-acquired multi-resistant strains, our results show a low overall incidence of such isolate. Our study provides a large microbiologic sample of patients with anorectal abscess to expand the present knowledge of the etiology of a common surgical condition.