New Delhi: A study reveals that younger people are increasingly being given antibiotics without sufficient assessment of complication risk, raising concerns that this could lead to resistance.
The study, performed by epidemiologists at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, found that doctors prescribe antibiotics to tens of thousands of patients with illnesses, with little or no regard for prognosis or the danger of the infection worsening.
The study, based on an analysis of 15.7 million patient records, revealed that the most elderly patients in the sample were 31 per cent less likely than the youngest patients to receive an antibiotic for upper respiratory infections.
This means “many younger people are being prescribed antibiotics, even though they are often fit enough to recover without them, potentially leading to resistance,” said the team in the paper, published in the prestigious Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.
Many older people who may not be able to deal with infections without antibiotics are not receiving them, with the potential of complications and hospital admissions.
Patients with combinations of diseases were 7 per cent less likely than people without major health problems to receive an antibiotic for upper respiratory infections.
Further, the findings revealed that the probability of being prescribed antibiotics for a lower respiratory tract or urinary tract infection was unrelated to hospital admission risk. On the other hand, the probability of being prescribed an antibiotic for an upper respiratory tract infection was only weakly related to hospital admission risk.
“Antibiotics are effective in treating bacterial infections, but they carry the risks of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and loss of effectiveness when used inappropriately. That is why AMR to antibiotics has been recognised as one of the biggest threats to global public health,” said lead author Professor Tjeerd van Staa from The University of Manchester
“The study finds that antibiotics for common infections are commonly not prescribed according to complication risk and that suggests there is plenty of scope to do more on reducing antibiotic prescribing,” van Staa added.
Dr. Ali Fahmi from the varsity urged “clinicians to focus on improving risk-based antibiotic prescribing for infections that are less severe and typically self-limiting".
With inputs from IANS