A Prospective Observational Study on De-Escalation of Antibiotics

The increasing emergence of antimicrobial resistance in the intensive therapy unit (ITU) threatens patient outcomes and substantially raises overall healthcare costs. Over the past several decades, the frequency of antimicrobial resistance and its association with serious infectious diseases have increased at alarming rates. The increasing resistance rate among nosocomial pathogens is particularly disconcerting. Powerful antibiotics first became commercially available in the 1940s and have saved untold millions of lives. But after years of widespread use, evolution of disease-causing microbes has resulted in many antimicrobials losing their effectiveness. As microbes evolve, they adapt to their environment. If something stops them from growing and spreading such as an antimicrobial they evolve new mechanisms to resist the antimicrobials by changing their genetic structure. Changing the genetic structure ensures that the offspring of the resistant microbes are also resistant.