ArticleBMC medicine2020
Quantifying the economic cost of antibiotic resistance and the impact of related interventions: rapid methodological review, conceptual framework and recommendations for future studies.
Article in BMC medicine, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 58 papers, 6 of them syntheses that pooled 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.
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.
Who cites it
58 citing papers in PubMed, 6 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 95 citations in OpenAlex.
- Economic Evaluation of Interventions to Reduce Antimicrobial Resistance: A Systematic Literature Review of Methods.PharmacoEconomics · 2025Pooled it
- Health economic studies of antimicrobial stewardship programmes: A scoping review.NIHR open research · 2024Pooled it
- The impact of inpatient bloodstream infections caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria in low- and middle-income countries: A systematic review and meta-analysis.PLoS medicine · 2023Pooled it
- Pooled it
- Economic evaluation of antimicrobial resistance in curable sexually transmitted infections; a systematic review and a case study.PloS one · 2023Pooled it
- β-Lactam-Resistant Streptococcus pneumoniae Dynamics Following Treatment: A Dose-Response Meta-analysis.Clinical infectious diseases : an official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America · 2022Pooled it
- Cost-effectiveness analysis of procalcitonin and lung ultrasonography guided antibiotic prescriptions in primary care.The European journal of health economics : HEPAC : health economics in prevention and care · 2025Trial
- Trial
- The burden of antimicrobial-resistant bacterial infections: a causal perspective.Nature communications · 2026Review
- Association Between Peer Comparison Feedback and Hospitalist Antibiotic Prescribing.JAMA network open · 2026Article
- Enhancing quality of antimicrobial prescribing through 'Ask Eolas' (language model): a user-testing and simulation evaluation.npj antimicrobials and resistance · 2026Article
- Societal Economic Burden of Antibiotic Resistance in Uganda: A Cost of Illness Study.PharmacoEconomics - open · 2026Article
- Aligning Indigenous and Western Concepts of Health Resource Decision Making in a Western Canadian First Nations Context.Applied health economics and health policy · 2026Article
- Exploring factors contributing to antibiotic resistance: A cross-sectional empirical study in Bangladesh.PloS one · 2026Article
- Antibiotic resistance: Survey of Russian veterinarians.Open veterinary journal · 2025Article
- The global economic burden of antibiotic-resistant infections and the potential impact of bacterial vaccines: a modelling study.BMJ global health · 2025Article
- Economic costing methodologies for drug-resistant bacterial infections in humans in low-and middle-income countries: a systematic review.Health economics review · 2025Review
- Article
- A methodological review of patient healthcare-seeking journeys from symptom onset to receipt of care.BMJ global health · 2025Review
- Cost-effectiveness of maintaining an active hospital microbiology laboratory service in Timor-Leste.The Lancet regional health. Southeast Asia · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 5 countries.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundAntibiotic resistance (ABR) poses a major threat to health and economic wellbeing worldwide. Reducing ABR will require government interventions to incentivise antibiotic development, prudent antibiotic use, infection control and deployment of partial substitutes such as rapid diagnostics and vaccines. The scale of such interventions needs to be calibrated to accurate and comprehensive estimates of the economic cost of ABR.
methodsA conceptual framework for estimating costs attributable to ABR was developed based on previous literature highlighting methodological shortcomings in the field and additional deductive epidemiological and economic reasoning. The framework was supplemented by a rapid methodological review.
resultsThe review identified 110 articles quantifying ABR costs. Most were based in high-income countries only (91/110), set in hospitals (95/110), used a healthcare provider or payer perspective (97/110), and used matched cohort approaches to compare costs of patients with antibiotic-resistant infections and antibiotic-susceptible infections (or no infection) (87/110). Better use of methods to correct biases and confounding when making this comparison is needed. Findings also need to be extended beyond their limitations in (1) time (projecting present costs into the future), (2) perspective (from the healthcare sector to entire societies and economies), (3) scope (from individuals to communities and ecosystems), and (4) space (from single sites to countries and the world). Analyses of the impact of interventions need to be extended to examine the impact of the intervention on ABR, rather than considering ABR as an exogeneous factor.
conclusionsQuantifying the economic cost of resistance will require greater rigour and innovation in the use of existing methods to design studies that accurately collect relevant outcomes and further research into new techniques for capturing broader economic outcomes.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
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.