Cause of concern-Antibiotics being overused in UTI and pneumonia after discharge
A study among patients diagnosed as having pneumonia and urinary tract infections (UTIs) at 46 hospitals in Michigan found that about half had antibiotic overuse after discharge, researchers reported late last week in Clinical Infectious Diseases.
The widespread use of antibiotics is estimated to have extended average life expectancy by two decades, shifting the paradigm from communicable to non-communicable diseases, but every time a new antimicrobial is introduced, drug resistance to that antimicrobial follows. There has been an exponential degree of rise in antimicrobial resistance globally. The decision to prescribe an antibiotic is complex and practitioners have given equivocal opinions regarding the same.
With such background, the present retrospective cohort study, led by researchers with Michigan Medicine, aimed to create a comprehensive metric to characterize antibiotic overuse after discharge among hospitalized patients treated for pneumonia or urinary tract infection (UTI) and determine whether overuse varied across hospitals and conditions.
The research team looked at patients treated for pneumonia or UTI at hospitals in the Michigan Hospital Medicine Safety Consortium from July 2017 through 2019 to quantify the proportion of patients discharged with antibiotic overuse, which was defined as unnecessary antibiotic use, excess antibiotic duration, or suboptimal fluoroquinolone use. The researchers used linear regression analysis to assess the hospital-level association between antibiotic overuse after discharge in patients treated for pneumonia versus patients treated for UTI.
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