**6. Mortality**

 Reviews of current evidence have found all-cause mortality to be substantial, ranging from 0% to 35%, with big variation probably due to different proportions of patient comorbidities between the studies and differences related to devices or the definition of CIED infection [7]. The high mortality figures do not only reflect the acute effects of the infection; a high proportion of the reported deaths are related to cardiac and other noninfection causes. This is also coherent with the observation that mortality is up to threefold higher when longer follow-up periods are compared to in-hospital or 30-day mortality [7]. Another observation has been

