A simple laboratory analysis will give doctor a hint whether antibiotic use is necessary in treatment

Doctors often abuse prescribing antibiotics for patients with a cough or symptoms of mere cold. Meanwhile, the most simple laboratory analysis is able to tell the doctor rather exactly if the patient really needs antibiotic therapy.

Universal implementing of such practice could decrease expenses for costly antibiotics by more than 40% and prevent patients from developing side effects caused by these powerful medications. 

Respiratory infections are really widespread, and doctors very often unreasonably prescribe antibiotics to their patients, basing only on indirect signs: cough, sputum, etc. And whereas such use of antibiotics in world-wide scale not only increases expenses for healthcare, but also threatens with even worse evil – development of strains with MDR, i.e. with multidrug resistance. 

German scientists of Hannover Medical School have established that a simple laboratory analysis for presence of procalcitonin (PCT) – bacterial infection marker – in patient’s organism is able to distinguish those particular patients, who are affected with infections of respiratory tract susceptible to antibiotic therapy. In other words, determining procalcitonin concentration in blood plasma may be a simple and reliable way to assess the severity of the clinical course of bacterial infection.

In healthy people PCT level is low, and in patients with bacterial infections of upper respiratory tract extremely high РСТ levels are already observed in three hours after infecting. In patients with viral infections РСТ level is practically not increased. 

"The strategy of treatment patients with acute больных respiratory diseases, based on determining of the level of РСТ marker, decreases antibiotic use by 41.6%", - Tobias Welte, the Head of group of scientists, who conducted the investigation, reports.

Adopted from: Zdorovye Ukrainy