Skip to main content

Antibiotics that dentists prescribe are unnecessary 81% of the time

Antibiotics prescribed by dentists as a preemptive strike against infection are unnecessary 81% of the time, according to a study published today in JAMA Network Open.
The findings are important because dentists are responsible for 10% of all antibiotic prescriptions written in the United States.
Antibiotics prescribed when not warranted expose patients to the risk of side effects unnecessarily and also contribute to the problem of antibiotic resistance -- bacteria evolving to make the drugs ineffective.
Antibiotics are recommended as a prophylactic prior to some dental procedures for patients with certain types of heart conditions.
Researchers including Jessina McGregor of Oregon State University used a national health care claims database to examine nearly 170,000 dentist-written antibiotic prescriptions from 2011 to 2015.
The prescriptions involved more than 90,000 patients, 57 percent female, with a median age of 63.
Greater than 90 percent of the patients underwent a procedure that possibly warranted taking an antibiotic ahead of time. However, less than 21 percent of those people had a cardiac condition that made an antibiotic prescription recommended under medical guidelines.
"Preventive antibiotics in these patients gave them risks that outweighed the benefits," said McGregor, an associate professor in the OSU College of Pharmacy.
Led by corresponding author Katie Suda of the University of Illinois-Chicago, the researchers also looked at the prescriptions regionally and found unnecessary prescriptions to be most prevalent, on a percentage basis, in the West; 11,601 of the 13,735 prescriptions written, or 85%, were out of sync with the guidelines.
The other regional percentages were 78% for the Northeast, 83% for the Midwest, and 80% for the South.
Eighty-two percent of the unnecessary prescriptions were written in urban population centers, 79% in rural areas.
Among patients who filled prescriptions for unnecessary antibiotics, clindamycin was the most common drug, and joint implants were the most typical reason they were prescribed.
"Dental providers are very thoughtful when they develop care plans for their patients and there are many factors that inform dentists' recommendations, but this study shows that there is an opportunity for dentists to reevaluate if necessary," said Susan Rowan of the Illinois-Chicago College of Dentistry. "I think dental providers should view this study, which is the first to look at preventive antibiotic prescribing for dental procedures, as a powerful call to action, not a rebuke."
The study was limited to patients with commercial dental insurance and the analysis used a broad definition of high-risk cardiac patients, suggesting the findings may underestimate the unnecessary prescribing of antibiotics.
Five other researchers from Illinois-Chicago and one from Northwestern University also collaborated on the study, which was funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
Story Source:
Materials provided by Oregon State University. Original written by Steve Lundeberg. 
Note: Content may be edited.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Home births as safe as hospital births: International study suggests

A large international study led by McMaster University shows that low risk pregnant women who intend to give birth at home have no increased chance of the baby's perinatal or neonatal death compared to other low risk women who intend to give birth in a hospital. The results have been published by  The Lancet 's  EClinicalMedicine  journal. "More women in well-resourced countries are choosing birth at home, but concerns have persisted about their safety," said Eileen Hutton, professor emeritus of obstetrics and gynecology at McMaster, founding director of the McMaster Midwifery Research Centre and first author of the paper. "This research clearly demonstrates the risk is no different when the birth is intended to be at home or in hospital." The study examined the safety of place of birth by reporting on the risk of death at the time of birth or within the first four weeks, and found no clinically important or statistically different risk between home...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dark matter may be older than the Big Bang

Dark matter, which researchers believe make up about 80% of the universe's mass, is one of the most elusive mysteries in modern physics. What exactly it is and how it came to be is a mystery, but a new Johns Hopkins University study now suggests that dark matter may have existed before the Big Bang. The study, published August 7 in  Physical Review Letters , presents a new idea of how dark matter was born and how to identify it with astronomical observations. "The study revealed a new connection between particle physics and astronomy. If dark matter consists of new particles that were born before the Big Bang, they affect the way galaxies are distributed in the sky in a unique way. This connection may be used to reveal their identity and make conclusions about the times before the Big Bang too," says Tommi Tenkanen, a postdoctoral fellow in Physics and Astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University and the study's author. While not much is known about its origins,...
Post a Comment
Read more

Scientists challenge notion of binary sexuality with naming of new plant species

A collaborative team of scientists from the US and Australia has named a new plant species from the remote Outback. Bucknell University biology postdoctoral fellow Angela McDonnell and professor Chris Martine led the description of the plant that had confounded field biologists for decades because of the unusual fluidity of its flower form. The discovery, published in the open access journal  PhytoKeys , offers a powerful example of the diversity of sexual forms found among plants. The new species of bush tomato discovered in remote Australia provides a compelling example of the fact that sexuality among Earth's living creatures is far more diverse -- and interesting -- than many people likely realize. Bucknell University postdoctoral fellow Angela McDonnell and biology professor Chris Martine led the study following an expedition last year to relocate populations of the new plant, which were first noted by Australian botanists during the 1970s. Herbarium specimens from th...
Post a Comment
Read more