These are clinical guidelines that provide recommendations to standardize the treatment and management of the most critical patients.
Dr. Antoni Torres, head of the IBIBAPS Applied research in infectious respiratory diseases and critically ill patients research group, senior consultant in the Pulmonology Service at the Hospital Clínic Barcelona and CIBERES researcher, is one of the coordinators of the guidelines and the first co-author of the article.
Community-acquired pneumonia is a type of lung infection that is characterized by a sudden onset, high fever, sharp chest pain or transient abdominal pain, rapid breathing, cough and purulent or rust-coloured sputum. There are around 6 cases per 1,000 individuals per year. Around 40% of the patients require hospitalization and 5% need to be admitted to an intensive care unit (ICU).
The most severe form of the disease, known as severe community–acquired pneumonia (sCAP), includes the patients who need to be in an ICU and who may need ventilatory support.
“Although there are various clinical practice guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of community-acquired pneumonia, they are not designed for patients with the most severe form of the disease", explains Antoni Torres.
So, the European Respiratory Society (ERS) promoted the development of the new guidelines for patients with sCAP, in which an international multidisciplinary panel of specialists in internal care medicine, infectious diseases and pulmonology participated.
These are the first guidelines published for patients with severe community-acquired pneumonia and focus, above all, on the most critically ill patients with this disease. They are useful for the specialists who are responsible for the care of patients and provide evidence of the most effective treatments, as well as the most appropriate strategies for the management of this type of pneumonia.
“The document also highlights current knowledge gaps in the management of this type of pneumonia, and makes recommendations to guide future research in this field”, concludes Dr. Torres.
Study reference:
ERS/ESICM/ESCMID/ALAT guidelines for the management of severe community-acquired pneumonia
Ignacio Martin-Loeches, Antoni Torres, Blin Nagavci, Stefano Aliberti, Massimo Antonelli, Matteo Bassetti, Lieuwe Bos, James Chalmers, Lennie Derde, Jan de Waele, Jose Garnacho-Montero, Marin Kollef, Carlos Luna, Rosario Menendez, Michael Niederman, Dimitry Ponomarev, Marcos Restrepo, David Rigau, Marcus Schultz, Emmanuele Weiss, Tobias Welte, Richard Wunderink
European Respiratory Journal 2023 61: 2200735; DOI: 10.1183/13993003.00735-2022
