“Bedside Score Predicts Risk of Carbapenem Resistance in Complicated Urinary Tract Infections”

“A poster presented at the 2018 ASM Microbe meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, has described the preparation and validation of a scoring system that accurately predicts the development of resistance to carbapenem in patients hospitalized with complicated urinary tract infection (cUTI).

Even better, the score can be applied at the bedside to rapidly gauge whether a patient is at risk of infection with a carbapenem-resistant pathogen.

It is a timely study. In the past 17 years, the number of hospitalizations due to cUTIs has risen by 50%. The bacterial culprits are most often Enterobacteriaceae and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Infections caused by Acinetobacter baumannii are comparatively rare, but often involve strains resistant to carbapenem, so when they occur they are bad.

Carbapenem resistance is increasing. This has been associated with inappropriate therapy that is administered based on experience, which is termed empiric therapy. Getting empiric therapy wrong is a harbinger of a worse outcome.

It is a no-brainer that improved empiric therapy when it comes to treating infections should improve the outcome for cUTI. With this in mind, researchers from OptiStatim, LLC, Melinta Therapeutics, The Medicines Company, and Washington Hospital Center set out to develop a scoring system that could predict carbapenem resistance at the bedside. The results were reported by Marya Zilberberg, MD, MPH, of EviMed Research Group, a research and scientific communication consultancy based in Goshen, Massachusetts.”