Articles related to Infectious Diseases

The recent phase 3 trial on pitavastatin’s effectiveness in HIV-infected patients opens new avenues in cardiovascular disease prevention within this demographic. Physicians may find the detailed insights on risk reduction and side effects beneficial in tailoring personalized care strategies.

Find out more about the concerning trend in the treatment of uncomplicated UTIs at emergency departments, and discover why so many patients may not be receiving the IDSA-recommended treatment.

The burgeoning use of procalcitonin testing in hospital medicine underscores its potential to guide antibiotic decisions, particularly during diagnostic uncertainty, while highlighting the need for effective clinician behavior change strategies and an understanding of the test’s limitations.

Unfolding a Clinical Enigma: From a Tibia Fracture in Congo to Mysterious Symptoms A Case Challenge study of a 58-year-old female who, after sustaining a tibia fracture in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), started experiencing persistent fatigue, abdominal bloating, and elevated eosinophil counts, ignites a journey into the intricacies of infectious disease diagnosis and management. After reading, what’s your diagnosis?

Dive into this CME program to grasp the latest C. difficile guidelines and implement treatment strategies effectively. This interactive CME program focuses on Clostridioides difficile, or C. difficile. As you know, this bacterium causes severe GI disturbances. Alarmingly, it impacts half a million Americans annually and burdens the healthcare system. Who is this for? Infectious disease physicians, gastroenterologists, hospitalists, intensivists, and all HCPs managing patients with C. difficile infection (CDI) will benefit greatly. Initially, the program offers a comprehensive review of CDI. It presents the epidemiology and pinpoints key risk factors. Moreover, it explains the underlying pathophysiology and outlines clinical features. Significantly, it emphasizes the disease’s burden and unveils diagnostic tools, including NAAT, GDH assay, and toxin tests. Following this, the program shifts to treatment strategies for CDI. It details procedures for various severity levels – mild, severe, fulminant, and recurrent. Concurrently, it underlines the common challenges in therapy decision-making. Importantly, it stresses the necessity of adhering to CDI guidelines and presents preventative measures. In the concluding section, participants receive practical patient cases. This allows the application of newfound knowledge directly. Afterward, it wraps up with a summary and a best practice recap. Upon completion, participants will grasp the burden […]

In a recent single-center prospective cohort study, the effect of unsuccessful treatment of ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) on mortality rates in patients with severe pneumonia was evaluated. The study involved 585 mechanically ventilated patients with severe pneumonia and respiratory failure, including 190 with severe COVID-19, all of whom underwent at least one bronchoalveolar lavage. A novel machine learning approach, CarpeDiem, was employed to group similar ICU patient-days into clinical states based on electronic health record data. Findings indicated that the lengthy ICU stays experienced by COVID-19 patients were largely due to prolonged periods of respiratory failure. The study discovered that although VAP wasn’t a contributing factor to mortality rates overall, patients with a single episode of unsuccessfully treated VAP demonstrated a significantly higher mortality rate (76.4%) compared to those with successfully treated VAP (17.6%). Furthermore, the CarpeDiem model highlighted that unresolved VAP was linked with transitions to clinical states associated with increased mortality. The study underscores that unsuccessful treatment of VAP is correlated with higher mortality and that patients with COVID-19 are at an elevated risk of VAP due to prolonged respiratory failure.