This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.

Medical liability concerns may fuel trend to overprescribe antibiotics

Add topic to email alerts

Receive an email when new articles are posted on

Please provide your email address to receive an email when new articles are posted on .

Subscribe

Added to email alerts

You've successfully added to your alerts. You will receive an email when new content is published.

Click Here to Manage Email Alerts

You've successfully added to your alerts. You will receive an email when new content is published.

Click Here to Manage Email Alerts

Back to Healio

We were unable to process your request. Please try again later. If you continue to have this issue please contact customerservice@slackinc.com.

Back to Healio

In a hypothesis-generating study, investigators at New York Medical College discovered that the prevalence of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus among S. aureus isolates from North America and Europe strongly correlated with the number of antibiotic prescriptions written and the density of attorneys in those geographic areas.

However, the survey-based study revealed that the prevalence of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) did not correlate with the density of physicians in the United States, Canada and European countries studied.

“These findings suggest that more research is needed to evaluate the potential impact of medical liability concerns on the medical care system,” lead author George Sakoulas, MD, stated in a New York Medical College press release.

“The study findings hint toward the importance of medical tort reform as a way to reduce health care costs and improve quality. Another way might be to foster more judicious prescription of antibiotics based on science and evidence rather than on risk aversion,” he noted in the release. The research recently appeared in the American Journal of Therapeutics.

Statistics, survey

For the study, Sakoulas and his colleagues analyzed antibiotic utilization data and census and population statistics for the United States, Canada and 15 European countries.

They then compared the information with the corresponding percentage of methicillin-resistance among clinical S. aureus isolates.

In addition, the investigators surveyed 162 health care providers about factors that affected how they selected treatment regimens and asked if they were concerned about the cost of antibiotics, formulary restrictions or greater medical liability risks for under-prescribing antibiotics.

Although the subject requires further study, “attorney density may be a crude surrogate marker” of physicians’ perceived fear of lawsuits, the investigators wrote in their abstract.

For more information:

• www.nymc.edu

Reference:

• Sakoulas G, Wormser GP, Visintainer P, et al. Relationship between population density of attorneys and prevalence of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus: Is medical-legal pressure on physicians a driving force behind the development of antibiotic resistance? Am J Ther. 2009. Sep-Oct; 16(5): e1-6. doi: 10.1097/MJT.0b013e3181727946.