Community-acquired pneumonia in adults: Approaches to antibacterial therapy in the context of current clinical guidelines

Abstract

Conciliatory guidelines for management of patients with either disease/abnormality have recently become an integral part of medical practice. The popularity of the guidelines is likely to owe to the fact that they are a more or less successful synthesis of abundant information within one document, by giving a physician detailed many-year and many-decade clinical and scientific experience. Since their publication, they become a peculiar standard of medical care delivery. The main benefit of such guidelines should be seen in the diagnosis and treatment standardization (without a physician's losing his/her reasonable autonomy in each individual case) that makes it possible to optimize a diagnostic process, to apply more effective therapeutic approaches, and to use less health care resources. By taking into account the drastically changing epidemiology of resistance of the causative agents of respiratory tract infection, the emergence of new antibiotics, and the rethinking of conventional diagnostic and therapeutic approaches, there is an apparent need for periodic revision and modification of such guidelines. In this regard, of particular interest are the conciliatory guidelines of the Russian Respiratory Society and Interregional Association of Clinical Microbiology and Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, which were published in 2010.

Keywords

• community-acquired pneumonia
• antibacterial therapy
• clinical guidelines