Mamer S. Rosario and Venancio P. Garduce
Background: No literature up to date has investigated on the mechanical strength of hand-mixed Vancomycin cement spacers. This puts to question the reliability of such practice in creating the spacers for load support in addition to Methicillinresistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) coverage.
Objective: The study compared the mechanical strength of hand-mixed generic Vancomycin bone cement with standard non-antibiotic bone cement.
Methods: One (1) gram vials of generic Vancomycin powder were dry-blended with the cement powder (Cemex) following standard aseptic hospital practice (1 g Vancomycin in 40 g of cement powder). Samples for the cement-alone group were done similarly except for the addition of the antibiotic powder. Tensile and compression samples were created, soaked in saline, and stored at 37 degrees Celsius for one week. All samples were tested at the University of the Philippines College of Engineering Mechanical Laboratory for compressive and tensile strength. Acceptance or rejection of the null hypothesis was conducted using the t-test procedure performed on Minitab 15 Trial Version, with α of 0.05 as the level of significance.
Results: T-test analysis performed on compressive strength data produced a p-value of 0.944 (α of 0.05), and on tensile strength data, 0.311 (α of 0.05).
Conclusion: There is no effect of the addition of hand-mixed generic Vancomycin on the mechanical properties of the bone cement.
