Articles related to ANTIBIOTICS

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.

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 the first update in more than five years, these new guidelines review dosing recommendations for 41 antimicrobials, as applicable for patients with a BMI greater than or equal to 30 kg/m.

The authors present the findings of a large retrospective cohort study that used national data from the SEER-Medicare-linked database to better understand the relationship between antibiotics and PDAC survival. They discovered that perichemotherapy antibiotics were associated with improved survival in patients treated with first-line gemcitabine but not fluorouracil, implying that perichemotherapy antibiotic treatment may have a role in patients with metastatic PDAC receiving gemcitabine. Prospective studies on the effect of perichemotherapy antibiotics with high pancreatic penetration and gram-negative coverage on survival in diverse populations of patients with metastatic PDAC treated with gemcitabine are recommended.

The shortage is driven by increased prescribing due to bacterial infection coexisting with RSV infection, and in cases where it is not possible to tell if the patient is experiencing a bacterial or viral URI. Substitute antibiotics to consider include cephalosporins and amoxicillin-clavulanate.

Although many organizations advise reducing the range of antibiotic therapy for hospitalized patients in light of laboratory findings, some are challenging the validity of the practice. One expert argued that there are insufficiently strong data on spectrum de-escalation to determine whether it improves outcomes.