wait so is a viable strat re: antibiotic resistant infections to just go a while without any antibiotics, then restart? granted, the patient needs to survive, and ideally not spread the infection to others, but still. Is this a documented action suite?
I don’t know for sure. It seems important that most antibiotic resistant infections start in a patient who is not on antibiotics, suggesting there’s a clinically meaningful time delay before the bacterial population loses antibiotic resistance in the absence of selection pressure.
Hospitals have tried approaches of either using distinct antibiotics on different patients, or rigidly using one antibiotic at a time on all patients on a rotation, in order to avoid antibiotic resistance, and I know the efficacy of these approaches does get studied.
I think with antibiotic resistance, we see the doctors trying one drug after another on the patient until they see a response. For each drug, the bacteria in the patient will have gone at least the length of time since the patient’s infection started since last being exposed to it. Possibly a patient who responds to no drugs but who manages to be kept alive despite the infection could then find success if the doctors tried one of the old drugs again. My guess is this is just a rare circumstance. In most cases the patient will have recovered or died.
wait so is a viable strat re: antibiotic resistant infections to just go a while without any antibiotics, then restart? granted, the patient needs to survive, and ideally not spread the infection to others, but still. Is this a documented action suite?
I don’t know for sure. It seems important that most antibiotic resistant infections start in a patient who is not on antibiotics, suggesting there’s a clinically meaningful time delay before the bacterial population loses antibiotic resistance in the absence of selection pressure.
Hospitals have tried approaches of either using distinct antibiotics on different patients, or rigidly using one antibiotic at a time on all patients on a rotation, in order to avoid antibiotic resistance, and I know the efficacy of these approaches does get studied.
I think with antibiotic resistance, we see the doctors trying one drug after another on the patient until they see a response. For each drug, the bacteria in the patient will have gone at least the length of time since the patient’s infection started since last being exposed to it. Possibly a patient who responds to no drugs but who manages to be kept alive despite the infection could then find success if the doctors tried one of the old drugs again. My guess is this is just a rare circumstance. In most cases the patient will have recovered or died.