Study Finds Antibiotics to Treat CAP Failed in 1 in 4 Patients: Why?

Alan Gross, PharmD, BCPS-AQID, Clinical Assistant Professor, Pharmacy Practice, University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Pharmacy, postulates why one in four patients experienced treatment failure for community-acquired pneumonia in a recent study.

Interview Transcript (slightly modified for readability):

“It’s really concerning that one in four patients are having treatment failure in community-acquired pneumonia, and certainly part of that may very well be because of resistance. A lot of patients in that study were receiving azithromycin, and that was, in their multi-variant analysis, one of the risk factors for treatment failure. In a lot of parts of the country, azithromycin does not have reliable activity for our most common pathogens, [like] Strep pneumoniae. And so, if we’re using that, of course, it makes sense that maybe those patients may not respond to therapy, and they might have to switch therapy to something that’s more reliably active for Streptococcus pneumoniae. Again, this gets to the point of we need to know what’s causing our pneumonia, and then effectively targeting it with our empiric antibiotics.”