Bacterial infection is the cause of 36% of patients with pneumonia requiring mechanical ventilation. Pseudomonas aeruginosa Resistance to treatment, according to data from a recent study conducted in Italy, Greece and Spain. exactly, Although new drugs and tools have been developed to combat multidrug-resistant bacteria, the fact is that sometimes people develop resistance to these new drugs, forcing professionals to turn to antibiotics in some cases.An ancient way to fight these infections.
this One example is colistin, a 1950s antibiotic that was abandoned due to high toxicity and had to be recycled to treat patients with pneumonia caused by coronavirus infections. Pseudomonas aeruginosa resistant to treatment.
about, Dr. Lluïsa Sorli, associate physician at the Department of Infectious Diseases at Del Mar Hospital, said, “The problem of bacterial multi-resistance to antibiotics is real and growing. As new drugs become available, their lifespan is only a few years, but bacteria are creating Resistance.” “Currently, we have new drugs that have come into hospitals within the last 5 or 10 years that may allow us to not have to use this old drug, but not all hospitals have access to these new drugs and we have found that sometimes, these bacteria Resistance to new drugs can also develop, so we have to turn to colistin again.” The problem with this approach is that In high doses, this drug may be toxic to the kidneys.
Against this background, researchers from the Infection Pathology and Antimicrobial Research Group at the Del Mar Hospital Research Institute conducted a study, the results of which have just been published in the journal Microbiology Spectrum, showing that increasing doses is not only beneficial for colistin. Treating the infection is useless but can lead to increased patient mortality.
The study, involving researchers from the CIBER Institute for Infectious Diseases, Melbourne’s Monash University and the Catalan Reference Laboratory, analyzed levels of the drug in the plasma of patients treated for pneumonia at Del Mar Hospital.caused by bacterial infection Pseudomonas aeruginosa Resistance to antibiotics and discovery People with higher levels do not evolve better, on the contrary, their mortality rate is also higher.
In this regard, Dr. Lluïsa Sorli, lead researcher of the study, commented: “Over the past 20 years, we have learned that in order to treat serious infections, we have to tend to use higher levels of antibiotics to achieve higher levels of antibiotics in the body. antibiotic levels.” In the blood, there is always a balance to be found between dose and nephrotoxicity, however, in this study we saw the opposite: the fact that patients had higher levels in their blood means not only that the infection is not getting better, but that “They’re dying and it ruins everything we’ve seen in recent years.”
Boarding changes
Given this evidence, the researchers recommend that in order to be able to offer treatments to patients with pneumonia caused by bacterial infections Pseudomonas aeruginosa Best approach to antibiotic resistance, The method of drug administration must be changed, using the intravenous route as a last resort and giving priority to aerosol administrationbecause in this way, colistin can be concentrated in the lungs, where the infection is located, and prevent it from entering the bloodstream, where it can affect the kidneys.
“Our group has shown that by giving colistin by inhalation, we can achieve very high concentrations in the lungs, which is what we aim to treat pneumonia, without the risk of toxicity that we have when we give it by route.” commented the doctor, who noted that these conclusions could also be applied to “methods of treating other infections caused by bacteria that are resistant to treatment.”