Prescribing antibiotics to patients who are hospitalized with “lung attacks” dramatically improves their outcomes, new research shows.
The study, published in Wednesday’s edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association, showed that patients who suffer “acute exacerbations of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease” and are treated with antibiotics see their risk of death fall by 55 per cent.
The simple, cheap treatment also lessened the need for mechanical ventilation by 73 per cent and slightly reduced the chance of a patient being readmitted to hospital for another lung attack within 30 days.
On the downside, COPD patients who were treated with antibiotics had a higher risk of contracting Clostridium difficile, a potentially grave bacterial infection. C. difficile thrives when standard antibiotics wipe out competing bacteria.
“All patients with acute exacerbations of COPD should be prescribed antibiotics,” said Dr. Michael Rothberg of Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass., and lead author of the study.
He said that this is the case even though only about half of lung attacks seem to be triggered by bacterial infections.
The new study involved 84,621 patients who were admitted for acute exacerbations of COPD at 413 acute-care facilities throughout the U.S. between January, 2006, and December, 2007. Seventy-nine per cent of them received antibiotics.
COPD is an insidious disease that begins with shortness of breath and degenerates into severe breathing problems like emphysema and bronchitis; it is characterized by blocked lungs and restricted air flow that place patients at risk from common respiratory infections and lead to blood clotting problems that trigger heart attacks and strokes.
A report published earlier this year found that about one in 10 adults over 35 now suffers from COPD.
People with COPD have flare-ups – essentially lung attacks – that require frequent and lengthy (read: expensive) hospital stays lasting an average of 10 days.
As many as one in three COPD patients in hospital don’t get out alive, a testament to the severity of the illness.
