Preventive Antibiotics for Poststroke Infection in Patients With Acute Stroke: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

This in Jan. 2018 is the exact same research into preventative antibiotics. Will your doctor take note of either one? With any strategy at all researchers wouldn't waste time and money doing the same research because they would know about all other ongoing and completed stroke research from that publicly available stroke research and protocol database.

Antibiotic therapy for preventing infections in people with acute stroke

 The latest here:

Preventive Antibiotics for Poststroke Infection in Patients With Acute Stroke: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Han, Xiaonian MA^*; Huang, Jing MA^*; Jia, Xiaotao MA^†; Peng, Lirong MA^‡; Yan, Kangkang MA^§; Zan, Xin MA^‡; Ma, Li MA^*

The Neurologist: March 2018 - Volume 23 - Issue 2 - p 35–42

doi: 10.1097/NRL.0000000000000152

Review Article

• Abstract
• In Brief
• Author Information

Aims: To determine if preventive antibiotics is effective in poststroke infection in patients with acute stroke in comparison with no prophylaxis.

Materials and Methods: MEDLINE (1950 to January 2017), the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL, The Cochrane Library, Issue 1, 2017) and EMBASE (1974 to January 2017) databases were used to search for randomized controlled trials with intervening measures related to the preventive antibiotics in patients with acute stroke. Besides, the reference lists of the retrieved publications were manually searched to explore other relevant studies.

Results: We included 6 randomized controlled trials involving 4110 stroke patients. The study population, study design, intervening measures, and definition of infection were different. Preventive antibiotics significantly reduced the incidence of algorithm-defined infection in patients with acute stroke from 11.14% (220/1975) to 7.43% (149/2006); odds ratio (OR)=0.41; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.20-0.87; P=0.02. There was no difference in mortality between 2 groups, the mortality in preventive antibiotics group was 17.03% (347/2037) and control group was 16.10% (328/2037); OR=1.07; 95% CI, 0.90-1.27; P=0.44. And preventive antibiotics did not improve the proportion of good outcome, the proportion of good outcome in preventive antibiotics group was 45.47% (909/1999) and control group was 45.76% (913/1995); OR=0.89; 95% CI, 0.62-1.28; P=0.53. None of the studies reported severe adverse relevant to the study antibiotics.

Conclusions: Preventive antibiotics significantly reduced the incidence of algorithm-defined infection in patients with acute stroke, but did not decrease the mortality or improve the proportion of good outcome. Future research should aim to identify the group of stroke patients who will benefit most from antibiotic prophylaxis.

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