Efficacy and Safety of a Protocol Using C-reactive Protein to Guide Antibiotic Therapy

Overview

The growing resistance of microorganisms to antimicrobials is a major threat to public health nowadays. Reducing the consumption of antibiotics is one of the main strategies to control this issue. Protocols using biomarkers to guide antimicrobial therapy have been studied, with promising results in safely reducing patient exposure to these drugs by reducing duration of treatments. Procalcitonin (PCT) and C-reactive protein (CRP) represent the most promising biomarkers in this context. Although less studied, CRP has the potential advantages of lower cost and wide availability when compared to PCT. However, decision algorithms involving biomarkers proposed in studies published so far are very far from daily medical practice in hospitals, mainly because there is poor accessibility to these protocols, and because most of them do not contemplate each patients clinical variables. The objective of this project is to evaluate the efficacy and safety of a multimodal protocol using clinical variables and the CRP value to guide antibiotic therapy in hospitalized patients. This protocol will be applied diretcly by the assistant medical teams through a digital clinical decision support tool available in the form of an application for mobile devices developed by the research team.

The research team will perform a randomized, controlled, concurrent, open, single-center clinical trial. The proposed intervention is the application of a protocol that uses clinical variables and the CRP value to guide the duration of antibiotic therapy in patients with suspected or confirmed bacterial infection. As for the control group, the duration of antibiotic therapy will be suggested according to the best available evidence, considering the primary site of infection and other characteristics of this process. For both groups, the study protocol will be applied through a digital application for use on smartphones or tablets, developed specifically for this project. Participants will be adults admitted to the internal medicine ward of the Hospital das Clínicas of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (HC-UFMG), for whom the assistant physician team has started antibiotic therapy in the last 72 hours. Patients will be allocated after signing a free and informed consent form. Follow-up will be carried out until hospital discharge, death or 90 days, whichever occurs first. The project was submitted for consideration to the Research Ethics Committee of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (COEP-UFMG) and approved. As primary outcome, the duration of antibiotic therapy will be evaluated for the infectious episode that motivated inclusion in the study. Duration of antibiotic therapy will be measured by antimicrobial days (defined by the aggregate of days a specific antimicrobial agent was administered to an individual patient) per 1000 present days (defined by the length of time during which a given patient is at risk for antimicrobial exposure at a given institution). As secondary outcomes, the investigators will assess total exposure to antimicrobials, antibiotic-free days, user satisfaction after using the digital tool, protocol adherence rate, length of stay, estimated cost of antimicrobial therapy, all-cause hospital mortality, therapeutic failure, reinfection rate, subsequent infections with multidrug-resistant microorganisms, Clostridioides difficile infection.