RT Journal Article
A1 Harris, Emily
T1 Study: Roughly 1 in 8 Patients Wrongly Diagnosed With Pneumonia
JF JAMA
JO JAMA
YR 2024
DO 10.1001/jama.2024.5920
VO 331
IS 18
SP 1525
OP 1525
SN 0098-7484
AB About 12% of patients were inappropriately diagnosed with community-acquired pneumonia (CAP), according to results from more than 17 000 hospitalized patients across 48 hospitals in Michigan. Older people as well as those with dementia or altered mental status were at particularly high risk of being inappropriately diagnosed, which the researchers defined as patients receiving antibiotics when they had fewer than 2 symptoms of pneumonia or negative chest x-ray results.Because older people are at higher risk of worse outcomes following a pneumonia diagnosis, clinicians sometimes are quick to prescribe antibiotics when they suspect the disease. Guidelines recommend that they reassess 2 or 3 days later. Yet about 88% of patients overdiagnosed with CAP received an antibiotic course that lasted longer than 3 days, the researchers reported in JAMA Internal Medicine. That percentage suggests that clinical teams didn’t tend to stop administering antibiotics once they started them, they noted.
RD 5/20/2024
UL https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2024.5920