Cervical cellulitis is an infrequent but serious infection. The management of the upper airways is difficult, at the actual time of intubation but also regarding the necessity of maintaining mechanical ventilation. The objective of this study is to identify risk factors on admission to the intensive care unit for difficult ventilatory weaning in patients with cervical cellulitis.

Between January 2013 and December 2018, this retrospective observational study was performed in an intensive care unit with 10 beds in a university hospital recognized as a reference center for the management of cellulitis. All intensive care patients receiving mechanical ventilation after surgery for cervical cellulitis were eligible. Difficult ventilatory weaning was defined as mechanical ventilation lasting more than 7 days or failure of extubation as established by the WIND 2017 study.

We included 120 patients with severe cervical cellulitis. The median age was 43 years. Eighteen patients (16%) presented mediastinal extension. The risk factor for difficult ventilatory weaning (n = 49) in multivariate analysis was a high level of procalcitonin on admission (OR at 1.14[1.005–1.29]; p<0.042) and the protective factor was surgery in an expert center (OR at 0.11[0.026–0.47]; p<0.003). Eight patients required a tracheotomy in our study: 3 patients during surgery and at a later time for the other 5 of our 8 patients.

No intensive care studies have investigated ventilatory weaning risk factors in patients with cervical cellulitis. Yet simple criteria seem to predict this risk. It is now necessary to confirm them by a multicenter prospective study.