Researchers found that patients treated with the antibiotic ceftaroline fosamil, or CPT-F, had a lower mortality rate after 28 days than the mortality rate seen in patients treated with vancomycin, the most common drug therapy for MRSA pneumonia.
In the retrospective study, 33 of 38 patients
responded well to treatments of CPT-F and were discharged from the
hospital after the infection cleared. Of the five patients who died,
three were attributed to other serious medical conditions.
The
mortality rate for patients treated with vancomycin has been reported to
be as high as 32 percent after 28 days. In the Henry Ford study, the
mortality rate for the CPT-F treated population was 13 percent.
The
study was presented on September 11, 2013, at the annual Interscience
Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy meeting in Denver.
“Many
things fall under the umbrella of proper and appropriate MRSA pneumonia
treatment, and these results present a possible benefit with the use of
CPT-F,” says Samia Arshad, a Henry Ford Infectious Diseases
epidemiologist and the study’s lead author. “It is critical for us to
find alternative drug therapies to improve patient outcomes. Further
research is needed to test the efficacy of CPT-F on a larger patient
population as CPT-F offers doctors another viable option for treating
patients with MRSA pneumonia.”
In 2010 the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration approved CPT-F, an injectable antibiotic, for treating
patients with bacterial infections like community-acquired bacterial
pneumonia and skin infections. Henry Ford’s study is the first to
evaluate the efficacy of MRSA pneumonia patients treated with CPT-F.
MRSA pneumonia is highly antibiotic resistant and most common in
patients 65 years or older.
Researchers evaluated 38 patients
treated with CPT-F. Twenty of these patients were failing standard
treatment with either vancomycin and/or cefepime, and were switched to
CPT-F. Researchers say no complications were reported in those 20
patients.
Researchers will continue to look for other patients
treated with CPT-F for MRSA pneumonia, and will match these patients to
others treated with different antibiotics to conduct a matched cohort
analysis.
Source: Henry Ford Health System via Newswise