Letter

Oral decontamination with chlorhexidine reduces the incidence of nosocomial pneumonia

Ilias I Siempos¹ and Matthew E Falagas^3,1,2*

• * Corresponding author: Matthew E Falagas m.falagas@aibs.gr

Author Affiliations

¹ Alfa Institute of Biomedical Sciences (AIBS), 9 Neapoleos Street, 151 23 Marousi, Athens, Greece

² Department of Medicine, Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

³ Department of Medicine, Henry Dunant Hospital, Athens, Greece

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Critical Care 2006, 11:402 doi:10.1186/cc5129

Published: 9 January 2007

First paragraph (this article has no abstract)

Pineda and colleagues [1] published a well-performed meta-analysis of four randomized controlled trials (RCTs) [2-5] exploring the effect of oral chlorhexidine (CHX) application on the incidence of nosocomial pneumonia (NP) in mechanically ventilated patients. They concluded that oral CHX decontamination did not reduce the incidence of NP in such patients; however, they clearly stated that the combined sample size of the four RCTs included may be inadequate for detecting important differences. Meanwhile, additional important data on this issue have been published; updating the findings of the above meta-analysis [1] is therefore warranted.