Evidence map›Paper›PMID 28915236›Full record

ArticlePLoS computational biology2017

Modeling antibiotic treatment in hospitals: A systematic approach shows benefits of combination therapy over cycling, mixing, and mono-drug therapies.

Burcu Tepekule, Hildegard Uecker, Isabel Derungs, Antoine Frenoy, Sebastian Bonhoeffer

Open access · goldAbstract read
In one paragraph

Article in PLoS computational biology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 34 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
34citing papers in PubMed, 1 pooled it
4.8field-weighted citation impact, top 5% of its field
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

34 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 70 citations in OpenAlex.

  1. Pooled it
  2. Review
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  5. The impact of treatment strategies on the epidemiological dynamics of plasmid-conferred antibiotic resistance.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024
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  18. Plasmid co-infection: linking biological mechanisms to ecological and evolutionary dynamics.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022
    Review
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4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

5 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.

Burcu TepekuleInstitute of Integrative Biology, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6936-9138
Hildegard UeckerInstitute of Integrative Biology, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
Isabel DerungsInstitute of Integrative Biology, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
Antoine FrenoyInstitute of Integrative Biology, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3539-8915
Sebastian BonhoefferInstitute of Integrative Biology, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8052-3925
ETH Zurich · CH

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Multiple treatment strategies are available for empiric antibiotic therapy in hospitals, but neither clinical studies nor theoretical investigations have yielded a clear picture when which strategy is optimal and why. Extending earlier work of others and us, we present a mathematical model capturing treatment strategies using two drugs, i.e the multi-drug therapies referred to as cycling, mixing, and combination therapy, as well as monotherapy with either drug. We randomly sample a large parameter space to determine the conditions determining success or failure of these strategies. We find that combination therapy tends to outperform the other treatment strategies. By using linear discriminant analysis and particle swarm optimization, we find that the most important parameters determining success or failure of combination therapy relative to the other treatment strategies are the de novo rate of emergence of double resistance in patients infected with sensitive bacteria and the fitness costs associated with double resistance. The rate at which double resistance is imported into the hospital via patients admitted from the outside community has little influence, as all treatment strategies are affected equally. The parameter sets for which combination therapy fails tend to fall into areas with low biological plausibility as they are characterised by very high rates of de novo emergence of resistance to both drugs compared to a single drug, and the cost of double resistance is considerably smaller than the sum of the costs of single resistance.

Indexed as

Anti-Bacterial AgentsDrug Resistance, BacterialDrug Therapy, CombinationHospitalsModels, BiologicalBacteriaBacterial InfectionsComputational BiologyDiscriminant AnalysisHumansAnti-Bacterial Agents

Identifiers

PMID28915236
PMCPMC5600366
OpenAlexW2754684752

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceCC BY
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.