Pneumonia News

BALTIMORE — Pediatric health care providers reported increased adherence to appropriate empiric therapy after the Infectious Diseases Society of America published its 2011 national guidelines for managing community-acquired pneumonia. The findings correspond with an observed change in practice at a tertiary care hospital, according to data presented at the Pediatric Academic Societies Meeting.

Results from a secondary analysis show a low correlation between C-reactive protein and procalcitonin in patients with acute respiratory infections, according to a recent study published in BMC Pulmonary Medicine.

BALTIMORE — Children diagnosed with aspiration pneumonia had longer and costlier hospitalizations than those with community-acquired pneumonia, according to recent study data presented at the Pediatric Academic Societies Meeting.

Patients hospitalized with community-acquired pneumonia demonstrated similar clinical outcomes regardless of whether initial fluoroquinolone treatment was administered orally or intravenously, according to a recently published study.

In a clinical comparison, researchers determined that patients with postobstructive community-acquired pneumonia, or PO-CAP, had a longer duration of symptoms and a more common occurrence of weight loss than those with bacterial community-acquired pneumonia, or B-CAP.

Patients with aspiration pneumonia had more complications, greater length of stay and 30-day readmission rates and higher hospital costs compared with patients who had nonaspiration pneumonia, according to recent research.

Respiratory infections are more severe during periods of unusual cold or low humidity, even in a subtropical location with typically high humidity, according to a study published in Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses.

Cases of community-acquired pneumonia were most commonly the result of viral infections, particularly respiratory syncytial virus, among children and adolescents in a heavily vaccinated population, according to recent findings in the Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal.

The majority of people hospitalized for influenza-associated pneumonia had not received a flu vaccine, according to study results published in JAMA.

A patient aged 2 years, who developed pneumonia after returning to the United States from a trip to India, was diagnosed with extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis and successfully treated into remission at John Hopkins Children’s Center, according to a report in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.