Antibiotics are now an accepted first-line treatment for most people with appendicitis, according to final results of the Comparing Outcomes of antibiotic Drugs and Appendectomy (CODA) trial, and an updated treatment guideline for appendicitis from the American College of Surgeons. The CODA study findings were to be reported Monday, Oct. 26, 2021, in the New England […]
Narrow-Spectrum Antibiotics Appear Effective and Safe for Community Acquired Pneumonia
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Using narrow-spectrum antibiotics to treat community-acquired pneumonia appears to be safe and effective, a study of patients in the Netherlands suggests. “Antimicrobial resistance is increasing,” Dr. Valentijn A. Schweitzer of the University Medical Center Utrecht told Reuters Health by email. “Our study shows that antimicrobial stewardship programs are effective and […]
Uncomplicated Pediatric Chest Infection: Antibiotics Don’t Help
Unless pneumonia is suspected, clinicians should not prescribe antibiotics for most children with chest infections, according to findings of the ARTIC-PC randomized controlled trial, published in The Lancet. “Prescribing for children with uncomplicated chest infections is still common in most countries,” said lead author Paul Little, MD, professor of primary care research at the University […]
Quinolones FDA Label Changes Resulted in Prescribing Decline
(Reuters Health) – A move by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2016 to remove systemic quinolones’ indication for acute uncomplicated urinary tract infection, acute sinusitis, and acute exacerbation of COPD reduced, but didn’t eliminate, prescribing for these indications, a new study suggests. Researchers examined records from Medicare and the IBM MarketScan Commercial […]
Treatment success seen with antibiotics for uncomplicated appendicitis
(HealthDay)—For adults with uncomplicated acute appendicitis, treatment success rates ≥65 percent are seen with both oral antibiotics and combined intravenous and oral antibiotics, according to a study published online Jan. 11 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Suvi Sippola, M.D., from Turku University Hospital in Finland, and colleagues compared oral antibiotics to combined […]
Research team reports new class of antibiotics active against a wide range of bacteria
Wistar Institute scientists have discovered a new class of compounds that uniquely combine direct antibiotic killing of pan drug-resistant bacterial pathogens with a simultaneous rapid immune response for combatting antimicrobial resistance (AMR). These finding were published today in Nature. The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared AMR as one of the top 10 global public […]
Too many COVID-19 patients get unneeded ‘just in case’ antibiotics
More than half of patients hospitalized with suspected COVID-19 in Michigan during the state’s peak months received antibiotics soon after they arrive, just in case they had a bacterial infection in addition to the virus, a new study shows. But testing soon showed that 96.5% of them only had the coronavirus, which antibiotics don’t affect. […]
Antibiotics use early in life increases risk of inflammatory bowel disease later in life
Even short, single antibiotic courses given to young animals can predispose them to inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) when they are older, according to Rutgers researchers. The study, published in Genome Medicine, provides further evidence supporting the idea that the use of antibiotics in children under 1 year old disrupts the intestinal microbiota—the trillions of beneficial […]
Tetracycline-family antibiotics may offer early diagnostic for degenerative eye disease
A paper published in the Journal of Biomedical Optics (JBO), “Imaging hydroxyapatite in sub-retinal pigment epithelial deposits by fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy with tetracycline staining,” demonstrates a potential new diagnostic option for catching a degenerative eye disease in its earliest stages. Tiny deposits of lipids, proteins, and minerals, sometimes known as drusen, can collect under […]