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Patients with Acne Take too much Antibiotics

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"Patients with Acne Take too much Antibiotics"

Patients with Acne take too much antibiotics before switching to alternate remedies.

A new study prompted by dermatologists comes in to prove that patients with acne take too much antibiotics. The paper, published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, states that patients suffering from one form of acne tend to remain on an antibiotic course for too long before their physicians realize that the treatment is ineffective.

It was Doctor Seth Orlow and his team of dermatologists from the Langone Medical Center who first discovered the issue and wrote a paper on in. Taking into consideration approximately 137 medical records from patients of over 12 years old, the team studied the issues between 2005 and 2014.

Orlow and the others explained in the paper that usually a patient undergoes a period of approximately 11 month of antibiotic therapy before the physician can discover if the treatment is effective or not in his case.

The alternative remedy for a patient that doesn’t respond to antibiotics is an acne medication named isotretinoin. In simpler terms, the drug’s name is Accutane. Although the treatment in considered to be highly effective in treating severe acne, doctors tend not to disclose to the patient such a course of treatment because of its side effects.

It has been demonstrated that Accutane can produce birth defects and can even induce depression in a patient. This is the chief reason why patients with acne take too much antibiotics.

The study prompts physicians to recognize if effectiveness of the antibiotic treatment in a few weeks, not a couple of months. A doctor Meera Sivendran, a dermatologist from the Icahn School of Medicine, said that patients often choose to take the safe route and rely on antibiotics, considered to be much safer than Accutane.

Although physicians caution patients when using Accutane it seems that on a long term, antibiotics could affect the body more severely than Accutane could. Patients who take large doses of antibiotics over an extended period of time tend to develop what is called antibiotic resistance. The more antibiotics you take the harder your body will fight next time you’ll have an infection.

Ironically, sooner or later, all patients who took antibiotics in order to treat instances of severe acne switch to Accutane.

The same doctor Sivendran keeps an open policy when discussing with an acne patient about Accutane. She says that on the second visit she will discuss both methods of treatment with the patient.

Doctor Arielle Nagler, a fellow dermatologist said that physicians should be able to recognize the efficiency of their treatments in order to see if Accutane can do a better job than antibiotics.

Image source: flickr.com

The Real and Hidden Dangers of CRE

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CRERoughly 160 patients within the UCLA health system were warned that they may have been given a procedure with contaminated equipment. The bacteria that infected the equipment are called carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, otherwise referred to as CRE. So far, the bacteria have been confirmed in seven people and of those, two died.

There are several types of drug-resistant bacteria with CRE being one. Others include methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA and Clostridium diffcile or C diff. These bacteria have evolved to the point that no known antibiotics can kill them. Because of this, the bacteria are called superbugs.

The problem is that if a drug-resistant bacteria like CRE enters the bloodstream, an infection developed that antibiotics cannot fight. Unfortunately, approximately 50% of people who get an infection of this type die.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drug-resistant bacterial infections are extremely common, with at minimum two million people in the US alone becoming infected annually, with about 23,000 dying. The agency continues saying that 1 in every 25 patients has at least one infection that is health-related on any given day.

In 2011, the number of healthcare-related infections in US acute care hospitals reached 722,000. A huge challenge is that often, these infections involve people already in the hospital who are sick and have compromised immune systems, making it difficult for the body to fight off infection.

Bacteria are extremely small and therefore, can hide in spaces that are impossible to see, like endoscopes in the case of the UCLA breakout. Regardless of how much equipment is cleaned and sterilized, some bacteria remain. Although healthcare professionals are doing everything possible to keep hospital settings safe, these invisible bacteria find their way into equipment, drains, and other hidden places. Bacteria then get onto the hands and clothing of workers and passed on to patients.

The other challenge is that there are few drugs that can treat CRE and other drug-resistant infections. Those used only as a last resort are carbapenems but if this does not work, a patient faces a dire situation.

These bacteria are capable of producing Klebsiella pneumonia carbapenemase, which is an enzyme that causes a wide range of antibiotics to become totally ineffective. Some of these include cephalosporins, penicillins, and beta-lactams.

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