The American journal of medicine
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Several well-controlled clinical trials have shown that prolonged antibiotic therapy has no benefit in relieving posttreatment Lyme disease symptoms. However, some insist that such symptoms are due to a persistent Borrelia burgdorferi infection requiring prolonged antibiotic therapy to resolve. This unproven view is bolstered by the results of in vitro experiments where small numbers of viable B. burgdorferi can be detected after treatment with antibiotics. The results described in the present work suggest that the presence of persisters can best be explained by classic biochemical kinetics and that there are alternative explanations for this phenomenon that appears to have no clinical significance.
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Observational Study
Time to Antibiotics and the Outcome of Patients with Septic Shock: A Propensity Score Analysis.
Current sepsis guidelines recommend administration of antibiotics within 1 hour of emergency department (ED) triage. However, the quality of the supporting evidence is moderate, and studies have shown mixed results regarding the association between antibiotic administration timing and outcomes in septic shock. We investigated to evaluate the association between antibiotic administration timing and in-hospital mortality in septic shock patients in the ED, using propensity score analysis. ⋯ In patients with septic shock, rapid administration of antibiotics was generally associated with a decrease in in-hospital mortality, but no "every hour delay" was seen.
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Blood pressure is a physiologic measure that reflects cardiac output and systemic vascular resistance. Classification by these components could be useful in characterizing subtypes of hypertension, which may have a role in selecting treatment strategies. However, hemodynamic phenotypes of a large, stable, outpatient population with hypertension remain unknown. ⋯ Different hemodynamic blood pressure phenotypes were identified across all hypertensive blood pressure categories. Although individual characteristics were associated with the cardiac index to systemic vascular resistance index ratio, they only weakly explained the variation.