Researchers claim prescriptions for antibiotic in most of the cases are inappropriate
Kathmandu, December 26
Researchers in the U.S. claimed that ambulatory care providers, in most of the cases, wrote prescriptions for antibiotics without giving documented reason for using the drug.
Michael J. Ray, a researcher at Oregon State University (OSU) College of Pharmacy, in Corvallis, who worked on the study with colleagues from OSU and other research centers in Oregon, analyzed data from the 2015 National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey. This gave them access to 28,332 sample visits, representing a nationwide figure of 990.9 million visits in 2015, as per Medical News Today.
The researchers claimed that some 24 million, or 18 percent, of the 130.5 million prescriptions for antibiotics that ambulatory care providers wrote in 2015 in the U. S. had no documented reason for using the drug.
The researchers also found that around 13 percent of the visits resulted in an antibiotic prescription, giving a nationwide total of 130.5 million prescriptions.
Similarly, they examined the medical reasons for these antibiotic prescriptions and identified 57 percent as appropriate, 25 percent as inappropriate, and 18 percent as having no documented indication.
Actually, ambulatory care is a general term for medical care that people receive without staying in a hospital or an institution—such as doctors' offices and health centers, as well as visits to gynecologists, dermatologists, urologists, and other specialists.
Researchers also identified another 32 million ambulatory care antibiotics prescriptions as inappropriate. This figure represented 25 percent of the prescriptions in the dataset.
While combining all the data, up to 43 percent of such prescriptions in the U.S. were potentially inappropriate, according to the study.
"Antibiotic prescribing without making note of the indication in a patient's medical records might be leading to a significant underestimation of the scope of unnecessary prescribing," told Ray as quoted by the Medical News Today. "When there's no indication documented. It's reasonable to think that at least some of the time, the prescription was written without an appropriate indication present," he added.
According to a report of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 2.8 million infections every year in the U.S. are antibiotic resistant. In addition, these infections kill more than 35,000 people a year.
