MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr. Tom Lodise PharmD, Professor Albany College of Health Sciences, NY  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: P. aeruginosa (PSA) is intrinsically resistant to many commercially available antibiotics and also has a remarkable capacity to develop resistance to commonly used antibiotics like carbapenems, aminoglycosides, and fluoroquinolones. The terms ‘multidrug resistant’ (MDR) and ‘pan-drug resistant’ are often used to characterize the different patterns of multiple drug resistance exhibited by PSA. Patients with MDR-PSA infections are at an increased risk for delayed receipt of appropriate antimicrobial therapy and ample studies indicated that receipt of delayed appropriate therapy results in substantial increases in morbidity, mortality, and healthcare resource utilization. Although risk factors for these types of infections have previously been identified in the literature, this study takes identification of risk factors further, and develops two clinical risk scores to estimate the probabilities of carbapenem and extensively beta-lactam non-susceptibility among hospitalized, adult patients with PSA infections based on covariates available on clinical presentation. We focused on these two PSA non-susceptible phenotypes as they represent infections at high risk of delayed appropriate therapy due to resistance against the current commonly prescribed empiric anti-pseudomonal antibiotics. (more…)