Congratulations to Pulmonary Faculty for contributing to the American Thoracic Society Documents
Dr. Antonio Anzueto and Dr. Marcos I. Restrepo from the Department of Medicine, Pulmonary Division, co-authored a paper recently published by the American Thoracic Society.
Diagnosis and Treatment of Adults with Community-acquired Pneumonia
An Official Clinical Practice Guideline of the American Thoracic Society and Infectious Diseases Society of America
In the more than 10 years since the last American Thoracic Society(ATS)/Infectious
Diseases Society of America (IDSA) community-acquired pneumonia (CAP)
guideline (1), there have been changes in the process for guideline development, as
well as generation of new clinical data. ATS and IDSA agreed on moving from the
narrative style of previous documents to the Grading of Recommendations Assessment,
Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) format. We thus developed this updated
CAP guideline as a series of questions answered from available evidence in an “is
option A better than option B” format using the Patient or Population,
Intervention, Comparison, Outcome (PICO) framework (2).
Given the expansion in information related to the diagnostic, therapeutic, and
management decisions for the care of patients with CAP, we have purposely
narrowed the scope of this guideline to address decisions from the time of clinical
diagnosis of pneumonia (i.e., signs and symptoms of pneumonia with radiographic
confirmation) to completion of antimicrobial therapy and follow-up chest
imaging. The document does not address either the initial clinical diagnostic criteria
or prevention of pneumonia. CAP is an extraordinarily
heterogeneous illness, both in the range of responsible pathogens and the host
response. Thus, the PICO questions we identified for this guideline do not represent
the full range of relevant questions about the management of CAP but encompass a set of
core questions identified as high priority by the panel. In addition, although each
question was addressed using systematic reviews of available high-quality studies,
the evidence base was often insufficient, emphasizing the continued importance of
clinical judgment and experience in treating patients with this illness and the need for
continued research.
Click on the link below to view the document.
THIS OFFICIAL CLINICAL PRACTICE GUIDELINE WAS APPROVED BY THE AMERICAN THORACIC SOCIETY MAY 2019 AND THE INFECTIOUS DISEASES SOCIETY OF AMERICA
AUGUST 2019