{"id":10640,"date":"2023-03-16T07:37:22","date_gmt":"2023-03-16T11:37:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/?p=10640"},"modified":"2023-03-19T14:07:36","modified_gmt":"2023-03-19T18:07:36","slug":"oral-antibiotic-therapy-for-endocarditis-are-we-there-yet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/oral-antibiotic-therapy-for-endocarditis-are-we-there-yet\/2023\/03\/16\/","title":{"rendered":"Oral Antibiotic Therapy for Endocarditis — Are We There Yet?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two terms in clinical research appear frequently in abstracts, conference presentations, and published papers — “clinical practice” and more recently, “real-world.”<\/p>\n

Many research snobs turn up their noses at both, finding them imprecise or pretentious. I confess to flinching each time I read “real-world” — isn’t everything “real-world”? If not, what’s the opposite? Mouse studies? (They’re certainly the real world from the mouse’s perspective, though not in a way that they would like.) Work done “in silico”? Trial participants recruited from the film Avatar?<\/em><\/p>\n

But having collaborated in several real world<\/em> studies over the years, I realize there is a reason to signal that data come from actual clinical practice<\/em> — that is, derived from people in care, outside the specified and restricted domains of a prospective research protocol.<\/p>\n

One such paper just appeared in Clinical Infectious Diseases<\/em><\/a>, entitled “Real-world Application of Oral Therapy for Infective Endocarditis: A Multicenter Retrospective, Cohort Study”.<\/p>\n

Here I’d argue that this “real-world” description is highly appropriate — because, as the authors note, despite evidence from randomized clinical trials on the efficacy and safety of oral therapy to complete treatment for endocarditis, uptake of this practice remains highly limited. We need people to report what they’ve seen after implementing this novel strategy.<\/p>\n

The authors cite experience within their healthcare system in 46 patients treated with oral therapy, compared with 211 who received IV. Importantly, these cases occurred after their system implemented an “Expected Practice” document sanctioning oral therapy in stable patients with no contraindications.<\/p>\n

Here are the results:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Looks great! As no fan of outpatient parenteral antimicrobial therapy<\/a> (OPAT), I was delighted to see that adverse events occurred significantly less often in the oral treatment group.<\/p>\n

Skeptics will argue that the biggest limitation of these data is that, like all nonrandomized studies, baseline differences between the two groups could have influenced the outcomes independent of the type of treatments they received. Specifically, the IV-only group was older with more comorbidities, while the oral antibiotic group had a higher proportion with a history of injection drug use. A multivariable regression analysis factoring in these differences did not demonstrate a significant impact on outcomes, but unmeasured differences cannot be accounted for.<\/p>\n

Limitations notwithstanding, the study provides helpful reassurance about the practice of using oral therapy to complete treatment for endocarditis — a practice that would have been unimaginable a decade ago.<\/p>\n

Curious to hear from readers, especially ID docs, pharmacists, and other clinicians doing hospital-based medicine — are you using oral therapy for endocarditis?<\/p>\n

If so, in what settings?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two terms in clinical research appear frequently in abstracts, conference presentations, and published papers — “clinical practice” and more recently, “real-world.” Many research snobs turn up their noses at both, finding them imprecise or pretentious. I confess to flinching each time I read “real-world” — isn’t everything “real-world”? If not, what’s the opposite? Mouse studies? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,8,10],"tags":[1152,674],"class_list":["post-10640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-care","category-patient-care","category-research","tag-endocarditis","tag-opat"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10640\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}