�Australian hospitals should invalidate prescribing expensive broad-spectrum antibiotics for pneumonia to avoid the development of more drug-resistant super bugs, according to a University of Melbourne study.
The study, by PhD research worker and Austin Health Infectious Diseases adviser, Dr Patrick Charles, shows that alone 5 per cent of people admitted to hospital with community-acquired pneumonia had infections caused by organisms that could not be successfully treated with penicillin combined with an "atypical" antibiotic such as doxycycline or erythromycin.
In the world's largest survey of its kind, Dr Charles studied almost 900 people admitted to sextet Australian hospitals over 28 months from 2004 to 2006.
Dr Charles' research analysed samples of blood, pee, sputum and viral swabs of the nose and throat taken from 885 patients at the Austin, Alfred, Monash and West Gippsland hospitals in Victoria, the Royal Perth Hospital and Princess Alexandra Hospital, Brisbane.
He base that most cases of pneumonia were caused by easy to treat bacterium such as the diplococcus pneumoniae or Mycoplasma, or or else by respiratory viruses that do not require antibiotic drug therapy.
Only five per centime of cases were caused by organisms that would require more expensive and broad-spectrum antibiotics, and these cases were nearly all in patients who'd had frequent hospital admissions or were residents of nursing homes.
"The cogitation results show that electric current Australian guidelines for prescribing antibiotics for pneumonia ar appropriate,'' Dr Charles said.
"It shows that Australian doctors should resist the push which is occurring in some parts of the worldly concern - in particular the US - to prescribe broad spectrum antibiotics to handle essentially all possible causes."
Dr Charles aforementioned the trend towards broad-spectrum antibiotics was being goaded by laboratory-based studies of resistance rates in bacterium sent to the labs, rather than clinical studies of patients with pneumonia.
In the laboratory-based studies, the bacterial isolates often come from highly selected patients with more difficult to treat disease.
In addition, the fear of litigation made some doctors unnecessarily opt for more aggressive treatments.
However, the more than frequently these broad-spectrum antibiotics were victimized, the more likely it was that bacteria would be become resistant to them.
"The outgrowth of antibiotic-resistant bacterial pathogens is one of the biggest threats to Australian health fear standards and is closely linked to the inappropriate use of antibiotics,'' Dr Charles said.
"By continuing to use more traditional antibiotics to treat most cases of pneumonia, Australian doctors canful limit or delay the emergence of more repellent strains of bacteria.
"By using the broad-spectrum antibiotics less often, we can as well prolong the effective lifetime of these drugs.
"Furthermore, in the US, Canada and some parts of Europe, they ar seeing some serious complications which seem to be related to the overutilization of some classes of broad-spectrum antibiotics that are frequently put-upon there to treat respiratory infections."
Dr Charles is a physician in Infectious Disease and General Medicine at the Austin Hospital in Melbourne. He is likewise an Honorary Lecturer in the University of Melbourne's Department of Medicine at the Hospital.
His study was recently published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases and he was conferred with a PhD for his research 27 August at the University of Melbourne.
He received funding from the independent 201CC Research Fund to complete the study.
Source: Janine Sim-Jones
University of Melbourne
More info
