(ANSA) – ROME – In children with pneumonia, halving the duration of treatment with antibiotics does not make the treatment less effective but reduces the risk of developing antibiotic resistance. This is what emerges from a study by the Yale School of Public Health published in mBio. “Defining the optimal duration of antibiotic therapy for pediatric pneumonia has been a priority area for research.
Recent studies have shown that 5 days can be as effective as 10 days of therapy for uncomplicated forms “, explain the researchers, who evaluated the effects of this approach on 171 children between 6 and 71 months treated for pneumonia in eight clinics. American pediatrics. All received prescriptions for common antibiotics (for example amoxicillin or the amoxicillin-clavulanic acid combination). However, half were treated with a longer course (10 days), the other a short course of treatment ( 5 days).
The researchers observed that, for the same treatment efficacy, children who received shorter throat swab treatment showed fewer indicators of antibiotic resistance, for example those genes that make bacteria acquire the ability to evade response to drugs. In addition, they retained more abundant populations of good bacteria in the gut.
“In the period 2014-2015, 931,748 prescriptions of antibiotics for pneumonia in people under the age of 20 were performed in the US,” the researchers write. The adoption of 5-day treatment courses “could lead to a reduction in antibiotic exposure of approximately 5 million days in US children” with benefits “both for individual children and for members of the community at large,” they conclude. . (HANDLE).
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