2024 Volume 39 Issue 4 Pages 117-125
This study was conducted in cases with positive blood cultures after the inception of the Antimicrobial Stewardship Team (AST) and divided into two groups according to whether AST recommendations were accepted or not, with the aim of comparing the recommendations, patient background, and overall mortality between the two groups.
In total, 96 adult hospitalized patients with positive blood cultures during a 1-year period beginning in January 2020 were included. We reviewed age, sex, department, length of hospitalization, medical history, comorbidities, type and duration of antimicrobial therapy, target disease, date of blood culture collection, culture results, the Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) score, presence of diabetes and artificial devices, estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR), recommended contents, number of recommendations, acceptance status, and outcomes. The patients were divided into two groups: "accepted" and "not accepted." Additionally, 30-day survival after positive blood cultures were compared using survival time analysis.
Sixty-seven and twenty-nine patients were in the accepted and not accepted groups, respectively. Among the accepted recommendations, de-escalation accounted for approximately half. There was no difference in age, sex, artificial devices, presence of diabetes, SOFA score, eGFR, recommended contents, and 30-day mortality between the two groups. The duration of antimicrobial therapy was significantly prolonged in the accepted group (p = 0.004). The 30-day survival had no significant difference between the two groups (p = 0.31) because of the small number of cases and the bias between the two groups. Further studies are needed to increase the number of cases and use multivariate analysis.
