A New Approach For The Treatment Of Community-acquired Pneumonia

Main Category: Respiratory / Asthma
Also Included In: Infectious Diseases / Bacteria / Viruses
Article Date: 26 Oct 2007 - 14:00 PDT

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Community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) is frequently a severe illness and is the leading cause of death by infectious disease and the sixth leading cause of global mortality in the first world. For this reason, improving the care of adult patients with CAP is one of the focuses of the most important research worldwide.

Despite more accurate aetiological diagnosis, effective antibiotic therapy and advances in supportive care, mortality rates of CAP remain quite similar to those reported more than 60 years ago at the dawn of the antibiotic era. It is a classical concept that some deaths are less dependent on antibiotic efficacy than on other factors, such as an inadequate host response. In this way, recent studies suggest that modulation of the host immune system could improve the outcomes of patients with severe pneumonia.

Carolina Garcia Vidal (Hospital Mutua de Terrassa, University of Barcelona, Spain) and her colleagues examined the role of systemic steroids as a complement to antibiotic treatment for the improvement of outcomes of this infection.
The results of this study are encouraging and suggest that systemic steroids can decrease mortality when administered as immunomodulating agents in immunocompetent hosts with severe CAP.

However, more studies are recommended in order to identify the subset of patients with severe pneumonia, in whom systemic steroid administration could be beneficial, and those for whom the use of this treatment could be associated with poor outcomes.

European Respiratory Journal