A study of patients with acute sinusitis found that “most received antibiotics, even when they didn’t meet antibiotic prescribing criteria.” CIDRAP has the news.

The report, published in Antimicrobial Stewardship & Healthcare Epidemiology, examined 1,000 randomly selected encounters at seven Mayo Clinic sites over a three-month period in 2024. The aim was to “evaluate how often the patients met the criteria for antibiotics, the appropriateness of prescribing, and the frequency with which prescribing followed guidelines.” Guidelines from IDSA and the American Academy of Otolaryngology “recommend antibiotics when sinusitis symptoms have persisted for 10 or more days, when symptoms are severe for three or more days, or when symptoms worsen within 10 days of initial improvement.”

Antibiotic prescribing encounters were met in just 67.6% of encounters studied by the researchers. 89.2% of encounters resulted in an antibiotic prescription, however. 93.5% of the encounters that met prescribing criteria ended with a prescription, as did 80.2% of those that did not. Antibiotic selection and duration were guideline-concordant in roughly half (49.2%) of all encounters in which they were prescribed.

The authors wrote that “these findings may aid antimicrobial stewardship programs in benchmarking and optimizing antibiotic prescribing for acute sinusitis.”