The incidence of P. aeruginosa septicemia has increased among hospitalized adults within recent years and there has been no evident improvement in mortality or length of hospital stay, according to data presented at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC) 2014.
“Data from a recent study demonstrated that the incidence of septicemia overall increased 32.4% from 2005-2010, but in the same time period, we found that P. aeruginosa septicemia increased by 51.2%,” Brian Werth, PharmD, assistant professor in the University of Washington School of Pharmacy, told Infectious Disease News. “It’s outpacing the general trend of septicemia as a whole, which may be an indicator that the increase in septicemia might be related to multidrug-resistant pathogens.”
From 1996 to 2010 there were 213,553 patients who had a P. aeruginosa septicemia discharge. The incidence in 1996 was 6.5 per 10,000 discharges, which declined to 3.1 per 10,000 discharges in 2001. However, the incidence more than doubled from 2001 to 2010, back to 6.5 per 10,000 discharges.
