The largest and one of the most significant worldwide gatherings of intensive care personnel - the 30th Annual Congress of the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine (ESICM) - occurred in Vienna this week, September 23-27.
CRE REDUCE researchers, Prof Jason Roberts and Prof Jeffrey Lipman were amongst the invited faculty, presenting their research on pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic approaches to antimicrobial therapy and restrictive approaches to empirical antimicrobial therapy.
A paper by Dr Mohd Hafiz Abdul-Aziz, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at CRE REDUCE, and colleagues, was recognised as amongst the Top 3 Articles published in 2016 by Intensive Care Medicine (ICM) - the official journal of the ESICM and the European Society of Paediatric and Neonatal Intensive Care. The original article was also in the Top 10 Most Cited papers in ICM for 2017 , with 30 total citations and discusses a randomised controlled trial (RCT) labelled as the best RCT at the Congress. The paper was one of the publications resulting from Hafiz's PhD, supervised by Professors Jason Roberts and Jeffrey Lipman.
The findings of the RCT suggest that continuous infusion of beta-lactam antibiotics may be beneficial for critically ill patients with severe illness and multi-drug resistant infections.
The work has potential implications for both immediate patient outcomes and for minimising the development of antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
Significantly, the work described in the paper proved to be a catalyst for a multinational study that will ascertain benefits of continuous infusion for critically ill with severe sepsis, including critical care settings across low-and-middle-income countries in the region and internationally.
This promises to be an important contribution towards the central goal of the CRE REDUCE of ensuring greater regional and international collaboration on the problem of AMR and toward better patient outcomes.
The paper doi. is: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00134-015-4188-0