Oftentimes, antibiotics will be incorrectly prescribed for viral infections, for which they'll have no effect and could inadvertently contribute to bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics. Researchers at Duke Health in Durham, N.C., are in the process of developing a blood test that could more rapidly determine the root cause of infections, whether viral or bacterial, and enable clinicians to make better decisions about antibiotic prescription.
"A respiratory infection is one of the most common reasons people come to the doctor," lead author Ephraim Tsalik, MD, PhD, assistant professor of medicine at Duke and emergency medicine provider at the Durham VA Medical Center, said in a news release. "We use a lot of information to make a diagnosis, but there's not an efficient or highly accurate way to determine whether the infection is bacterial or viral. About three-fourths of patients end up on antibiotics to treat a bacterial infection despite the fact that the majority have viral infections. There are risks to excess antibiotic use, both to the patient and to public health."
The results of an initial trial, published in Science Translational Medicine, found that looking at the gene signatures of patients to determine which kind of infection they were finding was 87 percent accurate in classifying more than 300 study participants with several common strains of strep bacteria and flu virus, among others. Though current technology returns a patient's gene expression profile in about 10 hours, the researchers are working to develop a one-hour test for clinic use.