According to scientists from the UT Southwestern Medical Center, adding corticosteroids to the traditional antimicrobial therapy can prove to be an effective option when it comes to helping pneumonia patients recover faster than with antibiotics alone.

Dr. Robert Hardy, associate professor of internal medicine and pediatrics and the study’s senior author, said that some people think that if you give steroids, they would counteract the antibiotic’s effect. But the truth is that patients need the antibiotic for killing the big and the steroids to improve the level of lung inflammation. In short, steroids do not actually kill the bug but help in restoring good health.

From Sciencedaily.com:

Although antimicrobials remain the primary therapy for M pneumoniae infection, there have been several reports in recent years about physicians adding steroids to the treatment regimen of patients with severe cases, Dr. Hardy said. The problem, he said, is that those were individual case reports.

“They never had a control group, so it was impossible to tell what impact the addition of steroids had on recovery,” he said.

The new findings not only suggest that giving antibiotics with steroids can help individuals with pneumonia get better faster, but also suggest a potentially more effective therapy for someone in the midst of an asthma attack due to M pneumoniae infection. Up to 20 percent of asthma attacks in children and adults have been shown to be triggered by this bacterium.

Despite the positive findings of this study, Dr. Hardy said that it is still too early to recommend steroids as a standard form of treatment for people suffering from this type of bacterial pneumonia, but the work does support the need for a clinical trial.

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Tags: antibiotics, antimicrobial therapy, corticosteroids, good health, pneumonia, steroids

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