New Study Finds New Antibiotics for Drug-Resistant Infections Are Being Used More

A new study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases found that “newer antibiotics designed for some of the most drug-resistant bacterial infections are being used more frequently but aren’t making a dent in survival rates.” CIDRAP has the news.

The study found that initial treatment for difficult-to-treat [DTR] gram-negative bacterial infections became more skewed toward one of six antibiotics approved in recent years, rising 300% from 2016 to 2023. However, “more than three-quarters of patients with DTR infections received initial treatment with discordant antibiotics—defined as antibiotics that either weren’t active against the pathogen or to which the pathogen was actively resistant.”

The six antibiotics in question were developed specifically to fight DTR infections. The researchers conducted a retrospective cohort study to see how uptake of these antibiotics progressed over time. Indeed, the proportion of hospitals reporting use of at least one of those antibiotics rose from 12% to 63% over the study period. However, “77% [of patients] received inadequate initial antibiotic treatment.” Mortality rates only dropped for one of the infections studied.

The authors of the study suggest that patients with these infections “tend to be older and have multiple comorbidities,” and nearly two-thirds of the patients in the study had a sepsis diagnosis. Clinicians may also have not chosen these antibiotics at times because of the “lack of evidence that they’re more effective against DTR infections.” They also tend to be more expensive.