The story behind the new sore throat article

Today, our latest sore throat article appears in the Annals of Internal Medicine. The story behind the article starts with this blog! This post documents the story as of 2009 when I wrote about Expanding the Pharyngitis Paradigm To recap, I first posted an article about the Lemierre Syndrome in 2002. Because of my long standing interest in adult sore throats, I immediately wondered if the rise in the Lemierre Syndrome should influence pharyngitis management. Since my thought experiment publication in 2009, working with some great colleagues, we developed a PCR for Fusobacterium necrophorum. We did some pilot work and proved to ourselves that the European data that showed a very low rate of Fusobacterium necrophorum in preadolescents were consistent in the US. Therefore we partnered with the wonderful staff at our college health clinic to prospectively collect throat swabs and clinical data. The European data did not include clinical information, but did suggest that in the 15-30 age group, Fusobacterium necrophorum pharyngitis occurs at least as often as strep pharyngitis. We found a wonderful collaborator at Michigan State University who did the PCR testing for group A and group C/G strep. Thus, we had the most complete data on the incidence of 3 bacteria (we also tested for Mycoplasma pneumoniae, but found it very uncommon in our patients) and their clinical presentations. We hypothesized that Fusobacterium pharyngitis would resemble strep pharyngitis. We based this...
Source: DB's Medical Rants - Category: Internal Medicine Authors: Tags: Medical Rants Source Type: blogs