The addition to corticosteroids to the traditional antimicrobial therapy can prove to be very effective in treating patients suffering from pneumonia than treating them with antibiotics alone, as per scientists from the UT Southwestern Medical Center.

Pneumonia is an infection of the lung, which is primarily characterized by breathing disorders and is spread by coughing and sneezing.

Dr. Robert Hardy, Associate Professor of Internal Medicine and Pediatrics and the study’s Senior Author remarked that steroids can prove their real worth when it comes to restoration of health after an individual catches pneumonia.

From News-Medical.Net:

In the current study, mice infected with the M pneumoniae bacterium were treated daily with a placebo, an antibiotic, a steroid, or a combination of the antibiotic and steroid in order to investigate the effect on M pneumoniae-induced airway inflammation. The animals were then evaluated after one, three and six days of therapy.

“It turns out that the group that got both the antibiotic and the steroids did the best,” Dr. Hardy said. “The inflammation in their lungs got significantly better.”

Although antimicrobials remain the primary therapy for M pneumoniae infection, there have been several reports in recent years about physicians adding steroids to the treatment regimen of patients with severe cases, Dr. Hardy said. The problem, he said, is that those were individual case reports.

“They never had a control group, so it was impossible to tell what impact the addition of steroids had on recovery,” he said.

It was also remarked by Dr. Hardy that though it is too early for him or others to recommend steroids as a form of standard treatment to patients with bacterial pneumonia but the findings do support the need for a clinical trial in the near future.

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.