When once is not enough – further evidence of procalcitonin-guided antibiotic stewardship
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* Corresponding author: Stephan Harbarth stephan.harbarth@hcuge.ch
1 Infection Control Program, Department of Internal Medicine, University of Geneva Hospitals and Medical School, CH-1211 Geneva 14, Switzerland
2 Department of Internal Medicine, Kantonsspital Aarau, CH-5001 Aarau, Switzerland
Critical Care 2009, 13:165 doi:10.1186/cc7935
Published: 13 July 2009Abstract
Every day, critical care physicians around the world face the same challenge of the optimal timing of antimicrobial administration: when to start and when to stop antibiotics. Duration of antibiotic therapy for sepsis is mostly based on expert opinion, but its reduction is arguably the most promising approach to decrease emergence and selection of antibiotic resistance. The study by Hochreiter and colleagues presents another piece of evidence suggesting that procalcitonin may indeed be a valuable diagnostic parameter to guide antibiotic treatment duration, despite the ongoing controversy about the diagnostic accuracy of pro-calcitonin.