Antibiotic treatments 'fail' 15% of the time

ConclusionOverall, this is a highly informative study of GP antibiotic prescribing for common infections in the UK. The overall antibiotic treatment failure rate was 15% over the course of the study period; these were mainly cases where there was a need to prescribe a different antibiotic within 30 days. There was a slight increase in failure rate, from 13.9% in 1991 to 15.4% in 2012. Within the infection classes, particular antibiotics had notable changes in failure rates, while others remained fairly stable. Reassuringly, amoxicillin and other commonly prescribed antibiotics currently still have fairly low failure rates. However, despite this study using a wealth of data from a reliable GP database, there are some limitations to bear in mind. Importantly, as the researchers say, there was no specific definition of treatment failure for them to use, so they had to use various proxy measures. They had no laboratory data available on the resistance of organisms to different antibiotics, so the study is not able to definitely say that antibiotic resistance was the reason for treatment failure. The most common indication of “treatment failure” in this study was the need for prescription of another antibiotic within 30 days, but it may not mean that the organism was resistant to the first antibiotic. – e.g. the person may not have taken the full prescribed treatment course, or the antibiotic may not have turned out to be appropriate for the type of bacteria the person had...
Source: NHS News Feed - Category: Consumer Health News Tags: Medication Medical practice Source Type: news