Pulmonology

Some people recovering from COVID-19 fare worse than current or previous cancer patients when referred to outpatient rehabilitation services, a new study from the CDC demonstrates.

People experiencing ongoing or “long-haul” symptoms after COVID-19 illness were more likely to report pain, challenges with physical activities, and “substantially worse health,” compared with people needing rehabilitation because of cancer, lead author Jessica Rogers-Brown, PhD, and colleagues report.

The study was published online July 9 in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).

The CDC investigators compared the self-reported physical and mental health symptoms, physical endurance, and use of health services of 1,295 outpatients recovering from COVID-19 and a control group of another 2,395 outpatients rehabilitating from a previous or current cancer diagnosis who had not experienced COVID-19.

Researchers used electronic health record data from January 2020 to March 2021 in the Select Medical network of outpatient clinics. The study included patients from 36 states and the District of Columbia.

Compared with people referred for cancer rehabilitation, those with COVID-19 symptoms lasting beyond 4 weeks were 2.3 times more likely to report pain, 1.8 times more likely to report worse physical health, and 1.6 times more likely to report difficulty with physical activities, an adjusted odds ratio analysis reveals.

The COVID-19 rehabilitation group also performed significantly worse on a 6-minute walk test, suggesting less physical endurance than people recovering from cancer (P < .001). They also used more rehabilitation services overall than the control group.

The researchers suggest services tailored to the unique physical and mental health rehabilitation needs of the post–COVID-19 patient population could be warranted.

The study does not suggest all people recovering with COVID-19 will fare worse than people recovering from cancer, the authors caution. They note that “these results should not be interpreted to mean that post–COVID-19 patients overall had poorer physical and mental health than patients with cancer.”

“Instead, results indicate that post–COVID-19 patients specifically referred to a large physical rehabilitation network had poorer health measures than those referred for cancer, which indicates that some patients recovering from COVID-19 had substantial rehabilitation needs.”

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Some people recovering from COVID-19 fare worse than current or previous cancer patients when referred to outpatient rehabilitation services, a new study from the CDC demonstrates.

People experiencing ongoing or “long-haul” symptoms after COVID-19 illness were more likely to report pain, challenges with physical activities, and “substantially worse health,” compared with people needing rehabilitation because of cancer, lead author Jessica Rogers-Brown, PhD, and colleagues report.

The study was published online July 9 in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).

The CDC investigators compared the self-reported physical and mental health symptoms, physical endurance, and use of health services of 1,295 outpatients recovering from COVID-19 and a control group of another 2,395 outpatients rehabilitating from a previous or current cancer diagnosis who had not experienced COVID-19.

Researchers used electronic health record data from January 2020 to March 2021 in the Select Medical network of outpatient clinics. The study included patients from 36 states and the District of Columbia.

Compared with people referred for cancer rehabilitation, those with COVID-19 symptoms lasting beyond 4 weeks were 2.3 times more likely to report pain, 1.8 times more likely to report worse physical health, and 1.6 times more likely to report difficulty with physical activities, an adjusted odds ratio analysis reveals.

The COVID-19 rehabilitation group also performed significantly worse on a 6-minute walk test, suggesting less physical endurance than people recovering from cancer (P < .001). They also used more rehabilitation services overall than the control group.

The researchers suggest services tailored to the unique physical and mental health rehabilitation needs of the post–COVID-19 patient population could be warranted.

The study does not suggest all people recovering with COVID-19 will fare worse than people recovering from cancer, the authors caution. They note that “these results should not be interpreted to mean that post–COVID-19 patients overall had poorer physical and mental health than patients with cancer.”

“Instead, results indicate that post–COVID-19 patients specifically referred to a large physical rehabilitation network had poorer health measures than those referred for cancer, which indicates that some patients recovering from COVID-19 had substantial rehabilitation needs.”

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Some people recovering from COVID-19 fare worse than current or previous cancer patients when referred to outpatient rehabilitation services, a new study from the CDC demonstrates.

People experiencing ongoing or “long-haul” symptoms after COVID-19 illness were more likely to report pain, challenges with physical activities, and “substantially worse health,” compared with people needing rehabilitation because of cancer, lead author Jessica Rogers-Brown, PhD, and colleagues report.

The study was published online July 9 in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).

The CDC investigators compared the self-reported physical and mental health symptoms, physical endurance, and use of health services of 1,295 outpatients recovering from COVID-19 and a control group of another 2,395 outpatients rehabilitating from a previous or current cancer diagnosis who had not experienced COVID-19.

Researchers used electronic health record data from January 2020 to March 2021 in the Select Medical network of outpatient clinics. The study included patients from 36 states and the District of Columbia.

Compared with people referred for cancer rehabilitation, those with COVID-19 symptoms lasting beyond 4 weeks were 2.3 times more likely to report pain, 1.8 times more likely to report worse physical health, and 1.6 times more likely to report difficulty with physical activities, an adjusted odds ratio analysis reveals.

The COVID-19 rehabilitation group also performed significantly worse on a 6-minute walk test, suggesting less physical endurance than people recovering from cancer (P < .001). They also used more rehabilitation services overall than the control group.

The researchers suggest services tailored to the unique physical and mental health rehabilitation needs of the post–COVID-19 patient population could be warranted.

The study does not suggest all people recovering with COVID-19 will fare worse than people recovering from cancer, the authors caution. They note that “these results should not be interpreted to mean that post–COVID-19 patients overall had poorer physical and mental health than patients with cancer.”

“Instead, results indicate that post–COVID-19 patients specifically referred to a large physical rehabilitation network had poorer health measures than those referred for cancer, which indicates that some patients recovering from COVID-19 had substantial rehabilitation needs.”

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Sublingual immunotherapy (SLIT) emerged over a century ago as a gentler alternative to allergy shots. It uses the same antigens found in allergy shots, delivering them through tablets or drops under the tongue rather than by injecting them into the skin.

Yet injection immunotherapy has been the mainstay of allergy treatment in the United States. Allergy shots are “the bread and butter, keeping the lights on at allergy practices,” said allergist Sakina Bajowala, MD, of Kaneland Allergy and Asthma Center, in the Chicago area. So even “when environmental SLIT showed quite clearly that it had efficacy, people were so slow to adapt.”

SLIT – a daily treatment that builds protection from allergens gradually over years with few side effects – is popular around the globe, particularly for environmental allergies. But only a handful of clinics offer food SLIT. Even though recent trials in peanut-allergic children show that SLIT is far safer than oral immunotherapy and about as effective as the Food and Drug Administration–approved peanut-allergy product and has lasting benefits for toddlers, many allergists lack experience with customized immunotherapies and hesitate to offer an unregulated treatment for which the evidence base is still emerging.
 

Why hasn’t food allergy SLIT caught on?

One issue is that there is scant evidence from randomized, controlled trials. The treatments that clinics offer often hinge on insurance coverage, and increasingly, insurers only cover FDA-approved products. FDA approval requires thousands of patients being enrolled in long, expensive studies to prove the treatment’s merit. In a similar vein, doctors are trained to question methods that lack a strong publication base, for good reason.

Yet SLIT caught the attention of pioneering physicians who were intrigued by this “low-and-slow” immune-modifying approach, despite limited published evidence, and they sought real-world experience.

The late physician David Morris, MD, came across SLIT in the 1960s while searching for alternative ways to help mold-allergic farmers who were suffering terrible side effects from allergy shots. Dr. Morris attended conferences, learned more about sublingual techniques, got board certified in allergy, and opened Allergy Associates of La Crosse (Wis.), in 1970 to offer SLIT as a treatment for food and environmental allergies.

Dr. Morris and colleagues developed a protocol to create custom SLIT drops tailored to individual patients’ clinical histories and allergy test results. The method has been used to treat more than 200,000 patients. It has been used by allergist Nikhila Schroeder, MD, MEng, who learned SLIT methods while treating nearly 1,000 patients at Allergy Associates. In 2018, she opened her own direct-care SLIT practice, Allergenuity Health, in the Charlotte metropolitan area of North Carolina (see part 2 of this series).

Dr. Bajowala’s clinic offers SLIT in addition to oral immunotherapy (OIT). She was encouraged by the recent toddler SLIT data but wondered whether it would translate to a real-world setting. According to her calculations, the published protocol – according to which participants receive up to 4 mg/d over 6 months and continue receiving a daily maintenance dose of 4 mg for 3 years – would cost $10,000 per patient.

With this dosing regimen, the intervention is unaffordable, Dr. Bajowala said. And “there’s no way to make it cheaper because that’s the raw materials cost. It does not include labor or bottles or profit at all. That’s just $10,000 in peanut extract.”

Owing to cost, Dr. Bajowala’s clinic generally uses SLIT as a bridge to OIT. Her food allergy patients receive up to 1 mg/d and remain at that dose for a month or so before transitioning to OIT, “for which the supplies are orders of magnitude cheaper,” she said.

Dr. Schroeder said there is evidence for efficacy at microgram and even nanogram dosing – much lower than used in the recent food SLIT trials. Maintenance doses range from 50 ng/d to 25 mcg/d for environmental SLIT and 4-37 mcg/d for food SLIT, she said. The La Crosse method uses even lower dose ranges.

However, dosing information is not readily available, Dr. Schroeder noted. She has spent years scrutinizing articles and compiling information from allergen extract suppliers – all the while treating hundreds of SLIT patients. “I have had to expend a lot of time and effort,” said Dr. Schroeder. “It’s really hard to explain quickly.”

In the published literature, SLIT dosing recommendations vary widely. According to a 2007 analysis, environmental allergy symptoms improved with doses over a 1,000-fold range. What’s more, success did not scale with increased dosing and seemed to depend more on frequency and duration of treatment.

There are fewer studies regarding food SLIT. The most promising data come from recent trials of peanut-allergic children led by Edwin Kim, MD, director of the UNC Food Allergy Initiative, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Still, “I am nervous to tell people to go do this based on 150 kids at one site,” Dr. Kim said. “We need to have a gigantic study across multiple sites that actually confirms what we have found in our single center.”

Because there are few published trials of food SLIT, confusion about which doses are optimal, how early to start, and how long the benefits last will be a barrier for many clinicians, said Douglas Mack, MD, FRCPC, assistant clinical professor in pediatrics at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ont.

Much could be learned from Allergy Associates of La Crosse, Allergenuity Health, and other clinics with SLIT experience involving thousands of patients. But that real-world data are messy and difficult to publish. Plus, it is hard for private allergists to find time to review charts, analyze data, and draft papers alongside seeing patients and running a clinic – especially without students and interns, who typically assist with academic research, Dr. Schroeder said.

Ruchi Gupta, MD, MPH, professor of pediatrics and medicine at Northwestern University, Chicago, and colleagues worked with a La Crosse team 6 or 7 years ago to try to analyze and publish SLIT outcomes for 121 peanut-allergic children who were treated for food and environmental allergies at the Wisconsin clinic. The researchers had hoped to publish an article describing caregiver-reported and clinical outcomes.

Among 73 caregivers who responded to a survey, more than half reported improved eczema, asthma, and environmental allergy symptoms, and virtually all families said SLIT calmed anxieties and minimized fear of allergic reactions. However, the clinical outcomes – skinprick test results, immune changes, and oral food challenges – were not as robust. And the data were incomplete. Some patients had traveled to La Crosse for SLIT drops but underwent skin and blood testing with their local allergist. Compiling records is “so much harder when you’re not doing a prospective clinical trial,” Dr. Gupta said.

The caregiver-reported outcomes were presented as a poster at the 2015 annual meeting of the American College of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology and the 2016 annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Society, said Jeff Kessler, MBA, FACHE, who is practice executive at La Crosse. However, with only self-reported data and no convincing lab metrics, the findings were never submitted for publication.

Others are eager to see clearer proof that SLIT works at doses lower than those published in the most recent trials. “If we can get efficacy with lower doses, that means we can increase accessibility, because we can lower the cost,” Dr. Bajowala said.

Robert Wood, MD, professor of pediatrics and director of pediatric allergy and immunology at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, has a pending grant proposal for a multifood trial of SLIT. “It’s a big missing piece,” he said.

Dr. Mack said that in Canada there was “almost an instant change in group think” when the Canadian Society of Allergy and Clinical Immunology published guidelines in support of OIT. With the new guidelines, “people are less concerned about liability. Once they start getting into OIT, I think you’re going to see SLIT coming right along for the ride.”

The shift will be slower in the United States, which has 20 times as many practicing allergists as Canada. Nevertheless, “I totally think SLIT has a place at the table,” Dr. Mack said. “I hope we start to see more high-quality data and people start to use it and experiment with it a bit and see how it works.”

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com. This is part three of a three-part series. Part one is here. Part two is here.

Sublingual immunotherapy (SLIT) emerged over a century ago as a gentler alternative to allergy shots. It uses the same antigens found in allergy shots, delivering them through tablets or drops under the tongue rather than by injecting them into the skin.

Yet injection immunotherapy has been the mainstay of allergy treatment in the United States. Allergy shots are “the bread and butter, keeping the lights on at allergy practices,” said allergist Sakina Bajowala, MD, of Kaneland Allergy and Asthma Center, in the Chicago area. So even “when environmental SLIT showed quite clearly that it had efficacy, people were so slow to adapt.”

SLIT – a daily treatment that builds protection from allergens gradually over years with few side effects – is popular around the globe, particularly for environmental allergies. But only a handful of clinics offer food SLIT. Even though recent trials in peanut-allergic children show that SLIT is far safer than oral immunotherapy and about as effective as the Food and Drug Administration–approved peanut-allergy product and has lasting benefits for toddlers, many allergists lack experience with customized immunotherapies and hesitate to offer an unregulated treatment for which the evidence base is still emerging.
 

Why hasn’t food allergy SLIT caught on?

One issue is that there is scant evidence from randomized, controlled trials. The treatments that clinics offer often hinge on insurance coverage, and increasingly, insurers only cover FDA-approved products. FDA approval requires thousands of patients being enrolled in long, expensive studies to prove the treatment’s merit. In a similar vein, doctors are trained to question methods that lack a strong publication base, for good reason.

Yet SLIT caught the attention of pioneering physicians who were intrigued by this “low-and-slow” immune-modifying approach, despite limited published evidence, and they sought real-world experience.

The late physician David Morris, MD, came across SLIT in the 1960s while searching for alternative ways to help mold-allergic farmers who were suffering terrible side effects from allergy shots. Dr. Morris attended conferences, learned more about sublingual techniques, got board certified in allergy, and opened Allergy Associates of La Crosse (Wis.), in 1970 to offer SLIT as a treatment for food and environmental allergies.

Dr. Morris and colleagues developed a protocol to create custom SLIT drops tailored to individual patients’ clinical histories and allergy test results. The method has been used to treat more than 200,000 patients. It has been used by allergist Nikhila Schroeder, MD, MEng, who learned SLIT methods while treating nearly 1,000 patients at Allergy Associates. In 2018, she opened her own direct-care SLIT practice, Allergenuity Health, in the Charlotte metropolitan area of North Carolina (see part 2 of this series).

Dr. Bajowala’s clinic offers SLIT in addition to oral immunotherapy (OIT). She was encouraged by the recent toddler SLIT data but wondered whether it would translate to a real-world setting. According to her calculations, the published protocol – according to which participants receive up to 4 mg/d over 6 months and continue receiving a daily maintenance dose of 4 mg for 3 years – would cost $10,000 per patient.

With this dosing regimen, the intervention is unaffordable, Dr. Bajowala said. And “there’s no way to make it cheaper because that’s the raw materials cost. It does not include labor or bottles or profit at all. That’s just $10,000 in peanut extract.”

Owing to cost, Dr. Bajowala’s clinic generally uses SLIT as a bridge to OIT. Her food allergy patients receive up to 1 mg/d and remain at that dose for a month or so before transitioning to OIT, “for which the supplies are orders of magnitude cheaper,” she said.

Dr. Schroeder said there is evidence for efficacy at microgram and even nanogram dosing – much lower than used in the recent food SLIT trials. Maintenance doses range from 50 ng/d to 25 mcg/d for environmental SLIT and 4-37 mcg/d for food SLIT, she said. The La Crosse method uses even lower dose ranges.

However, dosing information is not readily available, Dr. Schroeder noted. She has spent years scrutinizing articles and compiling information from allergen extract suppliers – all the while treating hundreds of SLIT patients. “I have had to expend a lot of time and effort,” said Dr. Schroeder. “It’s really hard to explain quickly.”

In the published literature, SLIT dosing recommendations vary widely. According to a 2007 analysis, environmental allergy symptoms improved with doses over a 1,000-fold range. What’s more, success did not scale with increased dosing and seemed to depend more on frequency and duration of treatment.

There are fewer studies regarding food SLIT. The most promising data come from recent trials of peanut-allergic children led by Edwin Kim, MD, director of the UNC Food Allergy Initiative, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Still, “I am nervous to tell people to go do this based on 150 kids at one site,” Dr. Kim said. “We need to have a gigantic study across multiple sites that actually confirms what we have found in our single center.”

Because there are few published trials of food SLIT, confusion about which doses are optimal, how early to start, and how long the benefits last will be a barrier for many clinicians, said Douglas Mack, MD, FRCPC, assistant clinical professor in pediatrics at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ont.

Much could be learned from Allergy Associates of La Crosse, Allergenuity Health, and other clinics with SLIT experience involving thousands of patients. But that real-world data are messy and difficult to publish. Plus, it is hard for private allergists to find time to review charts, analyze data, and draft papers alongside seeing patients and running a clinic – especially without students and interns, who typically assist with academic research, Dr. Schroeder said.

Ruchi Gupta, MD, MPH, professor of pediatrics and medicine at Northwestern University, Chicago, and colleagues worked with a La Crosse team 6 or 7 years ago to try to analyze and publish SLIT outcomes for 121 peanut-allergic children who were treated for food and environmental allergies at the Wisconsin clinic. The researchers had hoped to publish an article describing caregiver-reported and clinical outcomes.

Among 73 caregivers who responded to a survey, more than half reported improved eczema, asthma, and environmental allergy symptoms, and virtually all families said SLIT calmed anxieties and minimized fear of allergic reactions. However, the clinical outcomes – skinprick test results, immune changes, and oral food challenges – were not as robust. And the data were incomplete. Some patients had traveled to La Crosse for SLIT drops but underwent skin and blood testing with their local allergist. Compiling records is “so much harder when you’re not doing a prospective clinical trial,” Dr. Gupta said.

The caregiver-reported outcomes were presented as a poster at the 2015 annual meeting of the American College of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology and the 2016 annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Society, said Jeff Kessler, MBA, FACHE, who is practice executive at La Crosse. However, with only self-reported data and no convincing lab metrics, the findings were never submitted for publication.

Others are eager to see clearer proof that SLIT works at doses lower than those published in the most recent trials. “If we can get efficacy with lower doses, that means we can increase accessibility, because we can lower the cost,” Dr. Bajowala said.

Robert Wood, MD, professor of pediatrics and director of pediatric allergy and immunology at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, has a pending grant proposal for a multifood trial of SLIT. “It’s a big missing piece,” he said.

Dr. Mack said that in Canada there was “almost an instant change in group think” when the Canadian Society of Allergy and Clinical Immunology published guidelines in support of OIT. With the new guidelines, “people are less concerned about liability. Once they start getting into OIT, I think you’re going to see SLIT coming right along for the ride.”

The shift will be slower in the United States, which has 20 times as many practicing allergists as Canada. Nevertheless, “I totally think SLIT has a place at the table,” Dr. Mack said. “I hope we start to see more high-quality data and people start to use it and experiment with it a bit and see how it works.”

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com. This is part three of a three-part series. Part one is here. Part two is here.

Sublingual immunotherapy (SLIT) emerged over a century ago as a gentler alternative to allergy shots. It uses the same antigens found in allergy shots, delivering them through tablets or drops under the tongue rather than by injecting them into the skin.

Yet injection immunotherapy has been the mainstay of allergy treatment in the United States. Allergy shots are “the bread and butter, keeping the lights on at allergy practices,” said allergist Sakina Bajowala, MD, of Kaneland Allergy and Asthma Center, in the Chicago area. So even “when environmental SLIT showed quite clearly that it had efficacy, people were so slow to adapt.”

SLIT – a daily treatment that builds protection from allergens gradually over years with few side effects – is popular around the globe, particularly for environmental allergies. But only a handful of clinics offer food SLIT. Even though recent trials in peanut-allergic children show that SLIT is far safer than oral immunotherapy and about as effective as the Food and Drug Administration–approved peanut-allergy product and has lasting benefits for toddlers, many allergists lack experience with customized immunotherapies and hesitate to offer an unregulated treatment for which the evidence base is still emerging.
 

Why hasn’t food allergy SLIT caught on?

One issue is that there is scant evidence from randomized, controlled trials. The treatments that clinics offer often hinge on insurance coverage, and increasingly, insurers only cover FDA-approved products. FDA approval requires thousands of patients being enrolled in long, expensive studies to prove the treatment’s merit. In a similar vein, doctors are trained to question methods that lack a strong publication base, for good reason.

Yet SLIT caught the attention of pioneering physicians who were intrigued by this “low-and-slow” immune-modifying approach, despite limited published evidence, and they sought real-world experience.

The late physician David Morris, MD, came across SLIT in the 1960s while searching for alternative ways to help mold-allergic farmers who were suffering terrible side effects from allergy shots. Dr. Morris attended conferences, learned more about sublingual techniques, got board certified in allergy, and opened Allergy Associates of La Crosse (Wis.), in 1970 to offer SLIT as a treatment for food and environmental allergies.

Dr. Morris and colleagues developed a protocol to create custom SLIT drops tailored to individual patients’ clinical histories and allergy test results. The method has been used to treat more than 200,000 patients. It has been used by allergist Nikhila Schroeder, MD, MEng, who learned SLIT methods while treating nearly 1,000 patients at Allergy Associates. In 2018, she opened her own direct-care SLIT practice, Allergenuity Health, in the Charlotte metropolitan area of North Carolina (see part 2 of this series).

Dr. Bajowala’s clinic offers SLIT in addition to oral immunotherapy (OIT). She was encouraged by the recent toddler SLIT data but wondered whether it would translate to a real-world setting. According to her calculations, the published protocol – according to which participants receive up to 4 mg/d over 6 months and continue receiving a daily maintenance dose of 4 mg for 3 years – would cost $10,000 per patient.

With this dosing regimen, the intervention is unaffordable, Dr. Bajowala said. And “there’s no way to make it cheaper because that’s the raw materials cost. It does not include labor or bottles or profit at all. That’s just $10,000 in peanut extract.”

Owing to cost, Dr. Bajowala’s clinic generally uses SLIT as a bridge to OIT. Her food allergy patients receive up to 1 mg/d and remain at that dose for a month or so before transitioning to OIT, “for which the supplies are orders of magnitude cheaper,” she said.

Dr. Schroeder said there is evidence for efficacy at microgram and even nanogram dosing – much lower than used in the recent food SLIT trials. Maintenance doses range from 50 ng/d to 25 mcg/d for environmental SLIT and 4-37 mcg/d for food SLIT, she said. The La Crosse method uses even lower dose ranges.

However, dosing information is not readily available, Dr. Schroeder noted. She has spent years scrutinizing articles and compiling information from allergen extract suppliers – all the while treating hundreds of SLIT patients. “I have had to expend a lot of time and effort,” said Dr. Schroeder. “It’s really hard to explain quickly.”

In the published literature, SLIT dosing recommendations vary widely. According to a 2007 analysis, environmental allergy symptoms improved with doses over a 1,000-fold range. What’s more, success did not scale with increased dosing and seemed to depend more on frequency and duration of treatment.

There are fewer studies regarding food SLIT. The most promising data come from recent trials of peanut-allergic children led by Edwin Kim, MD, director of the UNC Food Allergy Initiative, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Still, “I am nervous to tell people to go do this based on 150 kids at one site,” Dr. Kim said. “We need to have a gigantic study across multiple sites that actually confirms what we have found in our single center.”

Because there are few published trials of food SLIT, confusion about which doses are optimal, how early to start, and how long the benefits last will be a barrier for many clinicians, said Douglas Mack, MD, FRCPC, assistant clinical professor in pediatrics at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ont.

Much could be learned from Allergy Associates of La Crosse, Allergenuity Health, and other clinics with SLIT experience involving thousands of patients. But that real-world data are messy and difficult to publish. Plus, it is hard for private allergists to find time to review charts, analyze data, and draft papers alongside seeing patients and running a clinic – especially without students and interns, who typically assist with academic research, Dr. Schroeder said.

Ruchi Gupta, MD, MPH, professor of pediatrics and medicine at Northwestern University, Chicago, and colleagues worked with a La Crosse team 6 or 7 years ago to try to analyze and publish SLIT outcomes for 121 peanut-allergic children who were treated for food and environmental allergies at the Wisconsin clinic. The researchers had hoped to publish an article describing caregiver-reported and clinical outcomes.

Among 73 caregivers who responded to a survey, more than half reported improved eczema, asthma, and environmental allergy symptoms, and virtually all families said SLIT calmed anxieties and minimized fear of allergic reactions. However, the clinical outcomes – skinprick test results, immune changes, and oral food challenges – were not as robust. And the data were incomplete. Some patients had traveled to La Crosse for SLIT drops but underwent skin and blood testing with their local allergist. Compiling records is “so much harder when you’re not doing a prospective clinical trial,” Dr. Gupta said.

The caregiver-reported outcomes were presented as a poster at the 2015 annual meeting of the American College of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology and the 2016 annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Society, said Jeff Kessler, MBA, FACHE, who is practice executive at La Crosse. However, with only self-reported data and no convincing lab metrics, the findings were never submitted for publication.

Others are eager to see clearer proof that SLIT works at doses lower than those published in the most recent trials. “If we can get efficacy with lower doses, that means we can increase accessibility, because we can lower the cost,” Dr. Bajowala said.

Robert Wood, MD, professor of pediatrics and director of pediatric allergy and immunology at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, has a pending grant proposal for a multifood trial of SLIT. “It’s a big missing piece,” he said.

Dr. Mack said that in Canada there was “almost an instant change in group think” when the Canadian Society of Allergy and Clinical Immunology published guidelines in support of OIT. With the new guidelines, “people are less concerned about liability. Once they start getting into OIT, I think you’re going to see SLIT coming right along for the ride.”

The shift will be slower in the United States, which has 20 times as many practicing allergists as Canada. Nevertheless, “I totally think SLIT has a place at the table,” Dr. Mack said. “I hope we start to see more high-quality data and people start to use it and experiment with it a bit and see how it works.”

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com. This is part three of a three-part series. Part one is here. Part two is here.

Sleep-disordered breathing is common in patients with neuromuscular disease and is increasingly addressed with noninvasive ventilation, but its patterns go beyond obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and include hypoventilation, hypoxemia, central sleep apnea, pseudocentrals, periodic breathing, and Cheyne-Stokes respiration, Gaurav Singh, MD, MPH said at the virtual annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies.

The prevalence of sleep-related disordered breathing surpasses 40% in patients diagnosed with neuromuscular disease, but “sleep disordered breathing [in these patients] does not equal obstructive sleep apnea,” said Dr. Singh, staff physician at the Veteran Affairs Palo Alto (Calif.) Health Care System in the section of pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine, and an affiliated clinical assistant professor at Stanford (Calif.) University.

“The most common sleep-related breathing disorder in neuromuscular disease is probably hypopnea and hypoventilation with the sawtooth pattern of dips in oxygen saturation that occur during REM sleep,” he said. As neuromuscular diseases progress, hypoventilation may occur during non-REM sleep as well.

Evaluation is usually performed with polysomnography and pulmonary function testing, he said, but supplementary testing including serum bicarbonate levels, arterial blood gases, and echocardiography to assess for left ventricular ejection fraction and cardiomyopathy may be useful as well.

While a sleep study is not required per Centers for Medicare & Medicaid coverage criteria for the use of respiratory assist devices in patients with neuromuscular disease, polysomnography is valuable for identifying early nocturnal respiratory impairment before the appearance of symptoms and daytime abnormalities in gas exchange, and is better than home testing for distinguishing different types of events (including pseudocentrals). It also is helpful for determining the appropriate pressures needed for ventilatory support and for assessing the need for a backup rate, Dr. Singh said.

Commonly used types of noninvasive ventilation include bilevel positive airway pressure on the spontaneous/timed or pressure control modes, with or without volume-assured pressure support, he said.

Expiratory positive airway pressure (EPAP) is usually set low initially to help decrease the work of breathing and improve triggering, then titrated up to ensure that upper airway obstructive events are treated. Pressure support (the difference between the inspiratory positive airway pressure and EPAP) is set to achieve target tidal volume and to rest the respiratory muscles. And inspiratory time is set “on the longer end” to achieve maximal target volume and ensure appropriate gas exchange, Dr. Singh said.

Data from randomized controlled trials evaluating the effectiveness of NIV are limited, he said. A study published 15 years ago showed a survival benefit and improvement in quality of life measures in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) with normal or moderately impaired bulbar function but not in those with severe bulbar weakness.

Regarding the timing of initiating NIV, a retrospective study published several years ago looked at almost 200 ALS patients and evaluated differences in survival amongst those started earlier with NIV (forced vital capacity ≥80%) and those started later (FVC <80%). At 36 months from diagnosis, mortality was 35% for the early group and 53% for the later group. “Improved survival was driven by benefit in patients with non–bulbar-onset ALS, compared with bulbar-onset disease,” Dr. Singh said.

“This study and several other similar studies seem to indicate that the earlier NIV [noninvasive ventilation] is started in patients with neuromuscular disease, the better in terms of improving survival and other relevant measures such as quality of life,” he said.

Asked about Dr. Singh’s presentation, Michelle Cao, DO, clinical associate professor at Stanford University, said that NIV is an “invaluable tool in the treatment of conditions leading to chronic respiratory failure,” such as neuromuscular disease, and that it’s important to incorporate NIV training for future pulmonary, critical care and sleep physicians. Dr. Cao directs the adult NIV program for the neuromuscular medical program at Stanford Health Care.

Saiprakash B. Venkateshiah, MD, of Emory University, Atlanta, also said in introducing Dr. Singh at the meeting that earlier diagnosis and appropriate NIV therapy “may improve quality of life and possibly even lower survival in certain disorders.”

In addition, he noted that sleep disturbances “may be the earliest sign of muscle weakness in [patients with neuromuscular disease], sometimes being detected before their underlying neuromuscular disease is diagnosed.”

Dr. Singh, Dr. Cao, and Dr. Venkateshiah each reported that they had no potential conflicts of interest.

Sleep-disordered breathing is common in patients with neuromuscular disease and is increasingly addressed with noninvasive ventilation, but its patterns go beyond obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and include hypoventilation, hypoxemia, central sleep apnea, pseudocentrals, periodic breathing, and Cheyne-Stokes respiration, Gaurav Singh, MD, MPH said at the virtual annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies.

The prevalence of sleep-related disordered breathing surpasses 40% in patients diagnosed with neuromuscular disease, but “sleep disordered breathing [in these patients] does not equal obstructive sleep apnea,” said Dr. Singh, staff physician at the Veteran Affairs Palo Alto (Calif.) Health Care System in the section of pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine, and an affiliated clinical assistant professor at Stanford (Calif.) University.

“The most common sleep-related breathing disorder in neuromuscular disease is probably hypopnea and hypoventilation with the sawtooth pattern of dips in oxygen saturation that occur during REM sleep,” he said. As neuromuscular diseases progress, hypoventilation may occur during non-REM sleep as well.

Evaluation is usually performed with polysomnography and pulmonary function testing, he said, but supplementary testing including serum bicarbonate levels, arterial blood gases, and echocardiography to assess for left ventricular ejection fraction and cardiomyopathy may be useful as well.

While a sleep study is not required per Centers for Medicare & Medicaid coverage criteria for the use of respiratory assist devices in patients with neuromuscular disease, polysomnography is valuable for identifying early nocturnal respiratory impairment before the appearance of symptoms and daytime abnormalities in gas exchange, and is better than home testing for distinguishing different types of events (including pseudocentrals). It also is helpful for determining the appropriate pressures needed for ventilatory support and for assessing the need for a backup rate, Dr. Singh said.

Commonly used types of noninvasive ventilation include bilevel positive airway pressure on the spontaneous/timed or pressure control modes, with or without volume-assured pressure support, he said.

Expiratory positive airway pressure (EPAP) is usually set low initially to help decrease the work of breathing and improve triggering, then titrated up to ensure that upper airway obstructive events are treated. Pressure support (the difference between the inspiratory positive airway pressure and EPAP) is set to achieve target tidal volume and to rest the respiratory muscles. And inspiratory time is set “on the longer end” to achieve maximal target volume and ensure appropriate gas exchange, Dr. Singh said.

Data from randomized controlled trials evaluating the effectiveness of NIV are limited, he said. A study published 15 years ago showed a survival benefit and improvement in quality of life measures in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) with normal or moderately impaired bulbar function but not in those with severe bulbar weakness.

Regarding the timing of initiating NIV, a retrospective study published several years ago looked at almost 200 ALS patients and evaluated differences in survival amongst those started earlier with NIV (forced vital capacity ≥80%) and those started later (FVC <80%). At 36 months from diagnosis, mortality was 35% for the early group and 53% for the later group. “Improved survival was driven by benefit in patients with non–bulbar-onset ALS, compared with bulbar-onset disease,” Dr. Singh said.

“This study and several other similar studies seem to indicate that the earlier NIV [noninvasive ventilation] is started in patients with neuromuscular disease, the better in terms of improving survival and other relevant measures such as quality of life,” he said.

Asked about Dr. Singh’s presentation, Michelle Cao, DO, clinical associate professor at Stanford University, said that NIV is an “invaluable tool in the treatment of conditions leading to chronic respiratory failure,” such as neuromuscular disease, and that it’s important to incorporate NIV training for future pulmonary, critical care and sleep physicians. Dr. Cao directs the adult NIV program for the neuromuscular medical program at Stanford Health Care.

Saiprakash B. Venkateshiah, MD, of Emory University, Atlanta, also said in introducing Dr. Singh at the meeting that earlier diagnosis and appropriate NIV therapy “may improve quality of life and possibly even lower survival in certain disorders.”

In addition, he noted that sleep disturbances “may be the earliest sign of muscle weakness in [patients with neuromuscular disease], sometimes being detected before their underlying neuromuscular disease is diagnosed.”

Dr. Singh, Dr. Cao, and Dr. Venkateshiah each reported that they had no potential conflicts of interest.

Sleep-disordered breathing is common in patients with neuromuscular disease and is increasingly addressed with noninvasive ventilation, but its patterns go beyond obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and include hypoventilation, hypoxemia, central sleep apnea, pseudocentrals, periodic breathing, and Cheyne-Stokes respiration, Gaurav Singh, MD, MPH said at the virtual annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies.

The prevalence of sleep-related disordered breathing surpasses 40% in patients diagnosed with neuromuscular disease, but “sleep disordered breathing [in these patients] does not equal obstructive sleep apnea,” said Dr. Singh, staff physician at the Veteran Affairs Palo Alto (Calif.) Health Care System in the section of pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine, and an affiliated clinical assistant professor at Stanford (Calif.) University.

“The most common sleep-related breathing disorder in neuromuscular disease is probably hypopnea and hypoventilation with the sawtooth pattern of dips in oxygen saturation that occur during REM sleep,” he said. As neuromuscular diseases progress, hypoventilation may occur during non-REM sleep as well.

Evaluation is usually performed with polysomnography and pulmonary function testing, he said, but supplementary testing including serum bicarbonate levels, arterial blood gases, and echocardiography to assess for left ventricular ejection fraction and cardiomyopathy may be useful as well.

While a sleep study is not required per Centers for Medicare & Medicaid coverage criteria for the use of respiratory assist devices in patients with neuromuscular disease, polysomnography is valuable for identifying early nocturnal respiratory impairment before the appearance of symptoms and daytime abnormalities in gas exchange, and is better than home testing for distinguishing different types of events (including pseudocentrals). It also is helpful for determining the appropriate pressures needed for ventilatory support and for assessing the need for a backup rate, Dr. Singh said.

Commonly used types of noninvasive ventilation include bilevel positive airway pressure on the spontaneous/timed or pressure control modes, with or without volume-assured pressure support, he said.

Expiratory positive airway pressure (EPAP) is usually set low initially to help decrease the work of breathing and improve triggering, then titrated up to ensure that upper airway obstructive events are treated. Pressure support (the difference between the inspiratory positive airway pressure and EPAP) is set to achieve target tidal volume and to rest the respiratory muscles. And inspiratory time is set “on the longer end” to achieve maximal target volume and ensure appropriate gas exchange, Dr. Singh said.

Data from randomized controlled trials evaluating the effectiveness of NIV are limited, he said. A study published 15 years ago showed a survival benefit and improvement in quality of life measures in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) with normal or moderately impaired bulbar function but not in those with severe bulbar weakness.

Regarding the timing of initiating NIV, a retrospective study published several years ago looked at almost 200 ALS patients and evaluated differences in survival amongst those started earlier with NIV (forced vital capacity ≥80%) and those started later (FVC <80%). At 36 months from diagnosis, mortality was 35% for the early group and 53% for the later group. “Improved survival was driven by benefit in patients with non–bulbar-onset ALS, compared with bulbar-onset disease,” Dr. Singh said.

“This study and several other similar studies seem to indicate that the earlier NIV [noninvasive ventilation] is started in patients with neuromuscular disease, the better in terms of improving survival and other relevant measures such as quality of life,” he said.

Asked about Dr. Singh’s presentation, Michelle Cao, DO, clinical associate professor at Stanford University, said that NIV is an “invaluable tool in the treatment of conditions leading to chronic respiratory failure,” such as neuromuscular disease, and that it’s important to incorporate NIV training for future pulmonary, critical care and sleep physicians. Dr. Cao directs the adult NIV program for the neuromuscular medical program at Stanford Health Care.

Saiprakash B. Venkateshiah, MD, of Emory University, Atlanta, also said in introducing Dr. Singh at the meeting that earlier diagnosis and appropriate NIV therapy “may improve quality of life and possibly even lower survival in certain disorders.”

In addition, he noted that sleep disturbances “may be the earliest sign of muscle weakness in [patients with neuromuscular disease], sometimes being detected before their underlying neuromuscular disease is diagnosed.”

Dr. Singh, Dr. Cao, and Dr. Venkateshiah each reported that they had no potential conflicts of interest.

The stark realities of antimicrobial resistance – including rising rates of difficult-to-treat infections, lack of a robust pipeline of future antimicrobials, and COVID-19 treatments that leave people more vulnerable to infections – remain urgent priorities, experts say.

For some patients, the pandemic and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) are intertwined.

“One patient I’m seeing now in service really underscores how the two interact,” Vance Fowler, MD, said during a June 30 media briefing sponsored by the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA). A man in his mid-40s, married with a small child, developed COVID-19 in early January 2021. He was intubated, spent about 1 month in the ICU, and managed to survive.

“But since then he has been struck with a series of progressively more drug resistant bacteria,” said Dr. Fowler, professor of medicine at Duke University, Durham, N.C., and chair of the IDSA Antimicrobial Resistance Committee.

The patient acquired Pseudomonas ventilator-associated pneumonia. Although the infection initially responded to standard antibiotics, he has experienced relapses over the past few months. Through these multiple infections the Pseudomonas grew increasingly pan-resistant to treatment.

The only remaining antimicrobial agent for this patient, Dr. Fowler said, is “a case study in what we are describing ... a drug that is used relatively infrequently, that is fairly expensive, but for that particular patient is absolutely vital.”
 

A ‘terrifying’ personal experience

Tori Kinamon, a Duke University medical student and Food and Drug Administration antibacterial drug resistance fellow, joined Dr. Fowler at the IDSA briefing. She shared her personal journey of surviving a methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infection, one that sparked her interest in becoming a physician.

“I had a very frightening and unexpected confrontation with antimicrobial resistance when I was a freshman in college,” Ms. Kinamon said.

A few days after competing in a Division One gymnastics championship, she felt a gradual onset of pain in her left hamstring. The pain grew acutely worse and, within days, her leg become red, swollen, and painful to the touch.

Ms. Kinamon was admitted to the hospital for suspected cellulitis and put on intravenous antibiotics.

“However, my clinical condition continued to decline,” she recalled. “Imaging studies revealed a 15-cm abscess deep in my hamstring.”

The limb- and life-threatening infection left her wondering if she would come out of surgery with both legs.

“Ultimately, I had eight surgeries in 2 weeks,” she said.

“As a 19-year-old collegiate athlete, that’s terrifying. And I never imagined that something like that would happen to me – until it did,” said Ms. Kinamon, who is an NCAA infection prevention advocate.

When Ms. Kinamon’s kidneys could no longer tolerate vancomycin, she was switched to daptomycin.

“I reflect quite frequently on how having that one extra drug in the stockpile had a significant impact on my outcome,” she said.
 

Incentivizing new antimicrobial agents

A lack of new antimicrobials in development is not a new story.

“There’s been a chill that’s been sustained on the antibiotic development field. Most large pharmaceutical companies have left the area of anti-infectants and the bulk of research and development is now in small pharmaceutical companies,” Dr. Fowler said. “And they’re struggling.”

One potential solution is the Pasteur Act, a bipartisan bill reintroduced in Congress and supported by IDSA. The bill encourages pharmaceutical companies to develop new antimicrobial agents with funding not linked to sales or use of the drugs.

Furthermore, the bill emphasizes appropriate use of these agents through effective stewardship programs.

Although some institutions shifted resources away from AMR out of necessity when COVID-19 struck, “I can say certainly from our experience at Duke that at least stewardship was alive and well. It was not relegated to the side,” Dr. Fowler said.

“In fact,” he added, “if anything, COVID really emphasized the importance of stewardship” by helping clinicians with guidance on the use of remdesivir and other antivirals during the pandemic.

Also, in some instances, treatments used to keep people with COVID-19 alive can paradoxically place them at higher risk for other infections, Dr. Fowler said, citing corticosteroids as an example.
 

Everyone’s concern

AMR isn’t just an issue in hospital settings, either. Ms. Kinamon reiterated that she picked up the infection in an athletic environment.

“Antimicrobial resistance is not just a problem for ICU patients in the hospital. I was the healthiest I had ever been and just very nearly escaped death due to one of these infections,” she said. ”As rates of resistance rise as these pathogens become more virulent, AMR is becoming more and more of a community threat,” she added.

Furthermore, consumers are partially to blame as well, Dr. Fowler noted.

“It’s interesting when you look at the surveys of the numbers of patients that have used someone else’s antibiotics” or leftover antimicrobial agents from a prior infection.

“It’s really startling ... that’s the sort of antibiotic overuse that directly contributes to antibacterial resistance,” he said.
 

Reasons for optimism

Promising advances in diagnostics, treatment, and prevention of AMRs are underway, Dr. Fowler said.

“It always gets me really excited to talk about it. It’s amazing what technology and scientific discovery can bring to this discussion and to this threat,” he said.

For example, there is a “silent revolution” in diagnostics with the aim to rapidly provide life-saving actionable data on a real patient in nearly real time.

Traditionally, “you start off by treating what should be there” while awaiting results of tests to narrow down therapy, Dr. Fowler said. However, a whole host of new platforms are in development to reduce the time to susceptibility results. This kind of technology has “the potential to transform our ability to take care of patients, giving them the right drug at the right time and no more,” he said.

Another promising avenue of research involves bacteriophages. Dr. Fowler is principal investigator on a clinical trial underway to evaluate bacteriophages as adjunct therapy for MRSA bacteremia.

When it comes to prevention on AMR infections in the future, “I continue to be optimistic about the possibility of vaccines to prevent many of these infections,” Dr. Fowler said, adding that companies are working on vaccines against these kinds of infections caused by MRSA or Escherichia coli, for example.
 

Patient outcomes

The man in his 40s with the multidrug resistant Pseudomonas infections “is now to the point where he’s walking in the halls and I think he’ll get out of the hospital eventually,” Dr. Fowler said.

“But his life is forever changed,” he added.

Ms. Kinamon’s recovery from MRSA included time in the ICU, 1 month in a regular hospital setting, and 5 months at home.

“It sparked my interest in antibiotic research and development because I see myself as a direct beneficiary of the stockpile of antibiotics that were available to treat my infection,” Ms. Kinamon said. “Now as a medical student working with patients who have similar infections, I feel a deep empathy and connectedness to them because they ask the same questions that I did.”

A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.

The stark realities of antimicrobial resistance – including rising rates of difficult-to-treat infections, lack of a robust pipeline of future antimicrobials, and COVID-19 treatments that leave people more vulnerable to infections – remain urgent priorities, experts say.

For some patients, the pandemic and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) are intertwined.

“One patient I’m seeing now in service really underscores how the two interact,” Vance Fowler, MD, said during a June 30 media briefing sponsored by the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA). A man in his mid-40s, married with a small child, developed COVID-19 in early January 2021. He was intubated, spent about 1 month in the ICU, and managed to survive.

“But since then he has been struck with a series of progressively more drug resistant bacteria,” said Dr. Fowler, professor of medicine at Duke University, Durham, N.C., and chair of the IDSA Antimicrobial Resistance Committee.

The patient acquired Pseudomonas ventilator-associated pneumonia. Although the infection initially responded to standard antibiotics, he has experienced relapses over the past few months. Through these multiple infections the Pseudomonas grew increasingly pan-resistant to treatment.

The only remaining antimicrobial agent for this patient, Dr. Fowler said, is “a case study in what we are describing ... a drug that is used relatively infrequently, that is fairly expensive, but for that particular patient is absolutely vital.”
 

A ‘terrifying’ personal experience

Tori Kinamon, a Duke University medical student and Food and Drug Administration antibacterial drug resistance fellow, joined Dr. Fowler at the IDSA briefing. She shared her personal journey of surviving a methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infection, one that sparked her interest in becoming a physician.

“I had a very frightening and unexpected confrontation with antimicrobial resistance when I was a freshman in college,” Ms. Kinamon said.

A few days after competing in a Division One gymnastics championship, she felt a gradual onset of pain in her left hamstring. The pain grew acutely worse and, within days, her leg become red, swollen, and painful to the touch.

Ms. Kinamon was admitted to the hospital for suspected cellulitis and put on intravenous antibiotics.

“However, my clinical condition continued to decline,” she recalled. “Imaging studies revealed a 15-cm abscess deep in my hamstring.”

The limb- and life-threatening infection left her wondering if she would come out of surgery with both legs.

“Ultimately, I had eight surgeries in 2 weeks,” she said.

“As a 19-year-old collegiate athlete, that’s terrifying. And I never imagined that something like that would happen to me – until it did,” said Ms. Kinamon, who is an NCAA infection prevention advocate.

When Ms. Kinamon’s kidneys could no longer tolerate vancomycin, she was switched to daptomycin.

“I reflect quite frequently on how having that one extra drug in the stockpile had a significant impact on my outcome,” she said.
 

Incentivizing new antimicrobial agents

A lack of new antimicrobials in development is not a new story.

“There’s been a chill that’s been sustained on the antibiotic development field. Most large pharmaceutical companies have left the area of anti-infectants and the bulk of research and development is now in small pharmaceutical companies,” Dr. Fowler said. “And they’re struggling.”

One potential solution is the Pasteur Act, a bipartisan bill reintroduced in Congress and supported by IDSA. The bill encourages pharmaceutical companies to develop new antimicrobial agents with funding not linked to sales or use of the drugs.

Furthermore, the bill emphasizes appropriate use of these agents through effective stewardship programs.

Although some institutions shifted resources away from AMR out of necessity when COVID-19 struck, “I can say certainly from our experience at Duke that at least stewardship was alive and well. It was not relegated to the side,” Dr. Fowler said.

“In fact,” he added, “if anything, COVID really emphasized the importance of stewardship” by helping clinicians with guidance on the use of remdesivir and other antivirals during the pandemic.

Also, in some instances, treatments used to keep people with COVID-19 alive can paradoxically place them at higher risk for other infections, Dr. Fowler said, citing corticosteroids as an example.
 

Everyone’s concern

AMR isn’t just an issue in hospital settings, either. Ms. Kinamon reiterated that she picked up the infection in an athletic environment.

“Antimicrobial resistance is not just a problem for ICU patients in the hospital. I was the healthiest I had ever been and just very nearly escaped death due to one of these infections,” she said. ”As rates of resistance rise as these pathogens become more virulent, AMR is becoming more and more of a community threat,” she added.

Furthermore, consumers are partially to blame as well, Dr. Fowler noted.

“It’s interesting when you look at the surveys of the numbers of patients that have used someone else’s antibiotics” or leftover antimicrobial agents from a prior infection.

“It’s really startling ... that’s the sort of antibiotic overuse that directly contributes to antibacterial resistance,” he said.
 

Reasons for optimism

Promising advances in diagnostics, treatment, and prevention of AMRs are underway, Dr. Fowler said.

“It always gets me really excited to talk about it. It’s amazing what technology and scientific discovery can bring to this discussion and to this threat,” he said.

For example, there is a “silent revolution” in diagnostics with the aim to rapidly provide life-saving actionable data on a real patient in nearly real time.

Traditionally, “you start off by treating what should be there” while awaiting results of tests to narrow down therapy, Dr. Fowler said. However, a whole host of new platforms are in development to reduce the time to susceptibility results. This kind of technology has “the potential to transform our ability to take care of patients, giving them the right drug at the right time and no more,” he said.

Another promising avenue of research involves bacteriophages. Dr. Fowler is principal investigator on a clinical trial underway to evaluate bacteriophages as adjunct therapy for MRSA bacteremia.

When it comes to prevention on AMR infections in the future, “I continue to be optimistic about the possibility of vaccines to prevent many of these infections,” Dr. Fowler said, adding that companies are working on vaccines against these kinds of infections caused by MRSA or Escherichia coli, for example.
 

Patient outcomes

The man in his 40s with the multidrug resistant Pseudomonas infections “is now to the point where he’s walking in the halls and I think he’ll get out of the hospital eventually,” Dr. Fowler said.

“But his life is forever changed,” he added.

Ms. Kinamon’s recovery from MRSA included time in the ICU, 1 month in a regular hospital setting, and 5 months at home.

“It sparked my interest in antibiotic research and development because I see myself as a direct beneficiary of the stockpile of antibiotics that were available to treat my infection,” Ms. Kinamon said. “Now as a medical student working with patients who have similar infections, I feel a deep empathy and connectedness to them because they ask the same questions that I did.”

A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.

The stark realities of antimicrobial resistance – including rising rates of difficult-to-treat infections, lack of a robust pipeline of future antimicrobials, and COVID-19 treatments that leave people more vulnerable to infections – remain urgent priorities, experts say.

For some patients, the pandemic and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) are intertwined.

“One patient I’m seeing now in service really underscores how the two interact,” Vance Fowler, MD, said during a June 30 media briefing sponsored by the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA). A man in his mid-40s, married with a small child, developed COVID-19 in early January 2021. He was intubated, spent about 1 month in the ICU, and managed to survive.

“But since then he has been struck with a series of progressively more drug resistant bacteria,” said Dr. Fowler, professor of medicine at Duke University, Durham, N.C., and chair of the IDSA Antimicrobial Resistance Committee.

The patient acquired Pseudomonas ventilator-associated pneumonia. Although the infection initially responded to standard antibiotics, he has experienced relapses over the past few months. Through these multiple infections the Pseudomonas grew increasingly pan-resistant to treatment.

The only remaining antimicrobial agent for this patient, Dr. Fowler said, is “a case study in what we are describing ... a drug that is used relatively infrequently, that is fairly expensive, but for that particular patient is absolutely vital.”
 

A ‘terrifying’ personal experience

Tori Kinamon, a Duke University medical student and Food and Drug Administration antibacterial drug resistance fellow, joined Dr. Fowler at the IDSA briefing. She shared her personal journey of surviving a methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infection, one that sparked her interest in becoming a physician.

“I had a very frightening and unexpected confrontation with antimicrobial resistance when I was a freshman in college,” Ms. Kinamon said.

A few days after competing in a Division One gymnastics championship, she felt a gradual onset of pain in her left hamstring. The pain grew acutely worse and, within days, her leg become red, swollen, and painful to the touch.

Ms. Kinamon was admitted to the hospital for suspected cellulitis and put on intravenous antibiotics.

“However, my clinical condition continued to decline,” she recalled. “Imaging studies revealed a 15-cm abscess deep in my hamstring.”

The limb- and life-threatening infection left her wondering if she would come out of surgery with both legs.

“Ultimately, I had eight surgeries in 2 weeks,” she said.

“As a 19-year-old collegiate athlete, that’s terrifying. And I never imagined that something like that would happen to me – until it did,” said Ms. Kinamon, who is an NCAA infection prevention advocate.

When Ms. Kinamon’s kidneys could no longer tolerate vancomycin, she was switched to daptomycin.

“I reflect quite frequently on how having that one extra drug in the stockpile had a significant impact on my outcome,” she said.
 

Incentivizing new antimicrobial agents

A lack of new antimicrobials in development is not a new story.

“There’s been a chill that’s been sustained on the antibiotic development field. Most large pharmaceutical companies have left the area of anti-infectants and the bulk of research and development is now in small pharmaceutical companies,” Dr. Fowler said. “And they’re struggling.”

One potential solution is the Pasteur Act, a bipartisan bill reintroduced in Congress and supported by IDSA. The bill encourages pharmaceutical companies to develop new antimicrobial agents with funding not linked to sales or use of the drugs.

Furthermore, the bill emphasizes appropriate use of these agents through effective stewardship programs.

Although some institutions shifted resources away from AMR out of necessity when COVID-19 struck, “I can say certainly from our experience at Duke that at least stewardship was alive and well. It was not relegated to the side,” Dr. Fowler said.

“In fact,” he added, “if anything, COVID really emphasized the importance of stewardship” by helping clinicians with guidance on the use of remdesivir and other antivirals during the pandemic.

Also, in some instances, treatments used to keep people with COVID-19 alive can paradoxically place them at higher risk for other infections, Dr. Fowler said, citing corticosteroids as an example.
 

Everyone’s concern

AMR isn’t just an issue in hospital settings, either. Ms. Kinamon reiterated that she picked up the infection in an athletic environment.

“Antimicrobial resistance is not just a problem for ICU patients in the hospital. I was the healthiest I had ever been and just very nearly escaped death due to one of these infections,” she said. ”As rates of resistance rise as these pathogens become more virulent, AMR is becoming more and more of a community threat,” she added.

Furthermore, consumers are partially to blame as well, Dr. Fowler noted.

“It’s interesting when you look at the surveys of the numbers of patients that have used someone else’s antibiotics” or leftover antimicrobial agents from a prior infection.

“It’s really startling ... that’s the sort of antibiotic overuse that directly contributes to antibacterial resistance,” he said.
 

Reasons for optimism

Promising advances in diagnostics, treatment, and prevention of AMRs are underway, Dr. Fowler said.

“It always gets me really excited to talk about it. It’s amazing what technology and scientific discovery can bring to this discussion and to this threat,” he said.

For example, there is a “silent revolution” in diagnostics with the aim to rapidly provide life-saving actionable data on a real patient in nearly real time.

Traditionally, “you start off by treating what should be there” while awaiting results of tests to narrow down therapy, Dr. Fowler said. However, a whole host of new platforms are in development to reduce the time to susceptibility results. This kind of technology has “the potential to transform our ability to take care of patients, giving them the right drug at the right time and no more,” he said.

Another promising avenue of research involves bacteriophages. Dr. Fowler is principal investigator on a clinical trial underway to evaluate bacteriophages as adjunct therapy for MRSA bacteremia.

When it comes to prevention on AMR infections in the future, “I continue to be optimistic about the possibility of vaccines to prevent many of these infections,” Dr. Fowler said, adding that companies are working on vaccines against these kinds of infections caused by MRSA or Escherichia coli, for example.
 

Patient outcomes

The man in his 40s with the multidrug resistant Pseudomonas infections “is now to the point where he’s walking in the halls and I think he’ll get out of the hospital eventually,” Dr. Fowler said.

“But his life is forever changed,” he added.

Ms. Kinamon’s recovery from MRSA included time in the ICU, 1 month in a regular hospital setting, and 5 months at home.

“It sparked my interest in antibiotic research and development because I see myself as a direct beneficiary of the stockpile of antibiotics that were available to treat my infection,” Ms. Kinamon said. “Now as a medical student working with patients who have similar infections, I feel a deep empathy and connectedness to them because they ask the same questions that I did.”

A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.

Pregnant women who have even mild sleep apnea should be treated for their sleep-disordered breathing given what is known about associated risks for hypertensive disorders of pregnancy and gestational diabetes, Carolyn M. D’Ambrosio, MS, MD, FCCP, said at the virtual annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies.

“This is the current standard of care,” Dr. D’Ambrosio said. “Although guidelines on this issue are not hard and fast, I’d say that knowing what we know about the risk of adverse [maternal] outcomes, we should all try to treat these problems as soon as they’re identified” and then repeat polysomnography or home sleep testing 3-6 months post partum to “be sure the sleep-disordered breathing has resolved.”

Estimates of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) prevalence range from approximately 9% in the first trimester to 20% in the third trimester. Yet recognizing the significance of OSA in pregnant women and identifying women for testing remains a major challenge. “Most women won’t [report sleep problems] because it’s pretty much common folklore that you don’t sleep well when you’re pregnant,” said Dr. D’Ambrosio, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, Boston, and current past-chair of the Women’s Lung Health Network for CHEST.

Many obstetricians and obstetrics providers, meanwhile, do not adequately screen. Typical screening tools like the Epworth Sleepiness Scale have low sensitivity and specificity during pregnancy, which means that inquiries about sleepiness, snoring, and disruptions in sleep are important, as is attention to potential risks for OSA posed by obesity, chronic hypertension, and neck circumference.

Only about a quarter of women in the United States snore during pregnancy, she noted. Snoring prevalence does increase as pregnancy progresses, reaching up to almost 50% in during the third trimester in some studies.

A four-variable screening tool reported almost 10 years ago for pregnant women is reliable for gauging risk, Dr. D’Ambrosio said. The model considers self-reported frequent snoring (more than three times/week), chronic hypertension, advanced maternal age, and a pregestational body mass index of at least 30 kg/m². “If these [factors] are present, the patient is at significant risk for OSA and should be strongly considered for testing,” she said.

Home sleep apnea testing (HSAT) is validated for pregnant women but “it can underestimate,” she said. “If you get a negative result and [have clinical suspicion], then don’t stop there.”

And considering that the prevalence of OSA – at all levels of severity – increases as pregnancy progresses, it’s important to continue talking about sleep with patients who have frequent snoring, for instance, but negative sleep test results early in pregnancy. “They could develop [OSA] as time goes on,” she said.
 

Associated risk factors

Independent associations between sleep-disordered breathing and adverse maternal outcomes were demonstrated in a prospective cohort study published several years ago of 3,705 women who underwent HSAT in early and mid-pregnancy. The adjusted odds ratios for preeclampsia when sleep-disordered breathing (an apnea-hypopnea index of ≥5) was present early in pregnancy and in mid-pregnancy were 1.94 and 1.95, respectively.

For hypertensive disorders of pregnancy more broadly, the ORs were 1.46 and 1.73, and for gestational diabetes, the ORs were 3.47 and 2.79.

“Faced with the question about why it’s important to diagnosis and treat OSA [during pregnancy] since the pregnancy will be over in a few months, I go to this study,” Dr. D’Ambrosio said. “Waiting until the end of pregnancy is not safe. There are increased risks of very serious conditions if sleep apnea is there and it’s not treated.”

Another study demonstrating a link between OSA and maternal outcomes looked over 1.5 million deliveries in the United States and found a significantly higher prevalence of gestational diabetes (OR, 2.08), gestational hypertension (OR, 1.77), preeclampsia (OR, 2.07), and eclampsia (OR, 2.70) in pregnant women with OSA than without, after adjusting for maternal obesity. Associations remained significant after adjusting for a more comprehensive list of covariates.

Multiple potential casual pathways are at play, Dr. D’Ambrosio said. Short sleep duration decreases leptin and increases ghrelin levels, for instance, and sleep fragmentation activates the HPA axis and increases cortisol. Intermittent hypoxemia affects sympathetic activity, and intrathoracic pressure swings cause increased oxidative stress and systemic inflammation.

The resulting endothelial dysfunction, glucose dysfunction, and dyslipidemia can drive the adverse maternal outcomes documented in these studies, she said, noting that the adverse outcomes can have long-term cardiovascular consequences.

Continuous positive airway pressure therapy is well tolerated in pregnancy, and given pregnancy’s continual weight change, auto-titrating CPAP may be the best option, she said.

There is “some limited data that treatment improves maternal outcomes, and we’re still working on trying to get better data and more solid recommendations,” Dr. D’Ambrosio said. There currently are no guidelines covering the diagnosis and management of OSA during pregnancy.

“We’ve come a long way ... but we still have more to do,” she said. “We have a long way to go to getting [OSA in pregnant women] well recognized, with screening techniques and diagnosis.”

Asked after the meeting about Dr. D’Ambrosio’s messages, Anita Rajagopal, MD, said that OSA screening during pregnancy needs to be improved through more collaboration “with our ob.gyn. and primary care colleagues.”

Too often, she said, “the signs and symptoms of OSA in pregnancy are written off as ‘just harmless snoring’ while in fact the patient has treatable sleep disordered breathing with potential adverse effects.” Dr. Rajagopal is department medical director for sleep medicine at Community Physician Network and medical director of the Community Health Network Sleep-Wake Disorders Center, both in Indianapolis.

Dr. D’Ambrosio reported that she has no potential conflicts of interest related to the material she presented, and Dr. Rajagopal stated she has no potential conflicts of interest.

Pregnant women who have even mild sleep apnea should be treated for their sleep-disordered breathing given what is known about associated risks for hypertensive disorders of pregnancy and gestational diabetes, Carolyn M. D’Ambrosio, MS, MD, FCCP, said at the virtual annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies.

“This is the current standard of care,” Dr. D’Ambrosio said. “Although guidelines on this issue are not hard and fast, I’d say that knowing what we know about the risk of adverse [maternal] outcomes, we should all try to treat these problems as soon as they’re identified” and then repeat polysomnography or home sleep testing 3-6 months post partum to “be sure the sleep-disordered breathing has resolved.”

Estimates of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) prevalence range from approximately 9% in the first trimester to 20% in the third trimester. Yet recognizing the significance of OSA in pregnant women and identifying women for testing remains a major challenge. “Most women won’t [report sleep problems] because it’s pretty much common folklore that you don’t sleep well when you’re pregnant,” said Dr. D’Ambrosio, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, Boston, and current past-chair of the Women’s Lung Health Network for CHEST.

Many obstetricians and obstetrics providers, meanwhile, do not adequately screen. Typical screening tools like the Epworth Sleepiness Scale have low sensitivity and specificity during pregnancy, which means that inquiries about sleepiness, snoring, and disruptions in sleep are important, as is attention to potential risks for OSA posed by obesity, chronic hypertension, and neck circumference.

Only about a quarter of women in the United States snore during pregnancy, she noted. Snoring prevalence does increase as pregnancy progresses, reaching up to almost 50% in during the third trimester in some studies.

A four-variable screening tool reported almost 10 years ago for pregnant women is reliable for gauging risk, Dr. D’Ambrosio said. The model considers self-reported frequent snoring (more than three times/week), chronic hypertension, advanced maternal age, and a pregestational body mass index of at least 30 kg/m². “If these [factors] are present, the patient is at significant risk for OSA and should be strongly considered for testing,” she said.

Home sleep apnea testing (HSAT) is validated for pregnant women but “it can underestimate,” she said. “If you get a negative result and [have clinical suspicion], then don’t stop there.”

And considering that the prevalence of OSA – at all levels of severity – increases as pregnancy progresses, it’s important to continue talking about sleep with patients who have frequent snoring, for instance, but negative sleep test results early in pregnancy. “They could develop [OSA] as time goes on,” she said.
 

Associated risk factors

Independent associations between sleep-disordered breathing and adverse maternal outcomes were demonstrated in a prospective cohort study published several years ago of 3,705 women who underwent HSAT in early and mid-pregnancy. The adjusted odds ratios for preeclampsia when sleep-disordered breathing (an apnea-hypopnea index of ≥5) was present early in pregnancy and in mid-pregnancy were 1.94 and 1.95, respectively.

For hypertensive disorders of pregnancy more broadly, the ORs were 1.46 and 1.73, and for gestational diabetes, the ORs were 3.47 and 2.79.

“Faced with the question about why it’s important to diagnosis and treat OSA [during pregnancy] since the pregnancy will be over in a few months, I go to this study,” Dr. D’Ambrosio said. “Waiting until the end of pregnancy is not safe. There are increased risks of very serious conditions if sleep apnea is there and it’s not treated.”

Another study demonstrating a link between OSA and maternal outcomes looked over 1.5 million deliveries in the United States and found a significantly higher prevalence of gestational diabetes (OR, 2.08), gestational hypertension (OR, 1.77), preeclampsia (OR, 2.07), and eclampsia (OR, 2.70) in pregnant women with OSA than without, after adjusting for maternal obesity. Associations remained significant after adjusting for a more comprehensive list of covariates.

Multiple potential casual pathways are at play, Dr. D’Ambrosio said. Short sleep duration decreases leptin and increases ghrelin levels, for instance, and sleep fragmentation activates the HPA axis and increases cortisol. Intermittent hypoxemia affects sympathetic activity, and intrathoracic pressure swings cause increased oxidative stress and systemic inflammation.

The resulting endothelial dysfunction, glucose dysfunction, and dyslipidemia can drive the adverse maternal outcomes documented in these studies, she said, noting that the adverse outcomes can have long-term cardiovascular consequences.

Continuous positive airway pressure therapy is well tolerated in pregnancy, and given pregnancy’s continual weight change, auto-titrating CPAP may be the best option, she said.

There is “some limited data that treatment improves maternal outcomes, and we’re still working on trying to get better data and more solid recommendations,” Dr. D’Ambrosio said. There currently are no guidelines covering the diagnosis and management of OSA during pregnancy.

“We’ve come a long way ... but we still have more to do,” she said. “We have a long way to go to getting [OSA in pregnant women] well recognized, with screening techniques and diagnosis.”

Asked after the meeting about Dr. D’Ambrosio’s messages, Anita Rajagopal, MD, said that OSA screening during pregnancy needs to be improved through more collaboration “with our ob.gyn. and primary care colleagues.”

Too often, she said, “the signs and symptoms of OSA in pregnancy are written off as ‘just harmless snoring’ while in fact the patient has treatable sleep disordered breathing with potential adverse effects.” Dr. Rajagopal is department medical director for sleep medicine at Community Physician Network and medical director of the Community Health Network Sleep-Wake Disorders Center, both in Indianapolis.

Dr. D’Ambrosio reported that she has no potential conflicts of interest related to the material she presented, and Dr. Rajagopal stated she has no potential conflicts of interest.

Pregnant women who have even mild sleep apnea should be treated for their sleep-disordered breathing given what is known about associated risks for hypertensive disorders of pregnancy and gestational diabetes, Carolyn M. D’Ambrosio, MS, MD, FCCP, said at the virtual annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies.

“This is the current standard of care,” Dr. D’Ambrosio said. “Although guidelines on this issue are not hard and fast, I’d say that knowing what we know about the risk of adverse [maternal] outcomes, we should all try to treat these problems as soon as they’re identified” and then repeat polysomnography or home sleep testing 3-6 months post partum to “be sure the sleep-disordered breathing has resolved.”

Estimates of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) prevalence range from approximately 9% in the first trimester to 20% in the third trimester. Yet recognizing the significance of OSA in pregnant women and identifying women for testing remains a major challenge. “Most women won’t [report sleep problems] because it’s pretty much common folklore that you don’t sleep well when you’re pregnant,” said Dr. D’Ambrosio, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, Boston, and current past-chair of the Women’s Lung Health Network for CHEST.

Many obstetricians and obstetrics providers, meanwhile, do not adequately screen. Typical screening tools like the Epworth Sleepiness Scale have low sensitivity and specificity during pregnancy, which means that inquiries about sleepiness, snoring, and disruptions in sleep are important, as is attention to potential risks for OSA posed by obesity, chronic hypertension, and neck circumference.

Only about a quarter of women in the United States snore during pregnancy, she noted. Snoring prevalence does increase as pregnancy progresses, reaching up to almost 50% in during the third trimester in some studies.

A four-variable screening tool reported almost 10 years ago for pregnant women is reliable for gauging risk, Dr. D’Ambrosio said. The model considers self-reported frequent snoring (more than three times/week), chronic hypertension, advanced maternal age, and a pregestational body mass index of at least 30 kg/m². “If these [factors] are present, the patient is at significant risk for OSA and should be strongly considered for testing,” she said.

Home sleep apnea testing (HSAT) is validated for pregnant women but “it can underestimate,” she said. “If you get a negative result and [have clinical suspicion], then don’t stop there.”

And considering that the prevalence of OSA – at all levels of severity – increases as pregnancy progresses, it’s important to continue talking about sleep with patients who have frequent snoring, for instance, but negative sleep test results early in pregnancy. “They could develop [OSA] as time goes on,” she said.
 

Associated risk factors

Independent associations between sleep-disordered breathing and adverse maternal outcomes were demonstrated in a prospective cohort study published several years ago of 3,705 women who underwent HSAT in early and mid-pregnancy. The adjusted odds ratios for preeclampsia when sleep-disordered breathing (an apnea-hypopnea index of ≥5) was present early in pregnancy and in mid-pregnancy were 1.94 and 1.95, respectively.

For hypertensive disorders of pregnancy more broadly, the ORs were 1.46 and 1.73, and for gestational diabetes, the ORs were 3.47 and 2.79.

“Faced with the question about why it’s important to diagnosis and treat OSA [during pregnancy] since the pregnancy will be over in a few months, I go to this study,” Dr. D’Ambrosio said. “Waiting until the end of pregnancy is not safe. There are increased risks of very serious conditions if sleep apnea is there and it’s not treated.”

Another study demonstrating a link between OSA and maternal outcomes looked over 1.5 million deliveries in the United States and found a significantly higher prevalence of gestational diabetes (OR, 2.08), gestational hypertension (OR, 1.77), preeclampsia (OR, 2.07), and eclampsia (OR, 2.70) in pregnant women with OSA than without, after adjusting for maternal obesity. Associations remained significant after adjusting for a more comprehensive list of covariates.

Multiple potential casual pathways are at play, Dr. D’Ambrosio said. Short sleep duration decreases leptin and increases ghrelin levels, for instance, and sleep fragmentation activates the HPA axis and increases cortisol. Intermittent hypoxemia affects sympathetic activity, and intrathoracic pressure swings cause increased oxidative stress and systemic inflammation.

The resulting endothelial dysfunction, glucose dysfunction, and dyslipidemia can drive the adverse maternal outcomes documented in these studies, she said, noting that the adverse outcomes can have long-term cardiovascular consequences.

Continuous positive airway pressure therapy is well tolerated in pregnancy, and given pregnancy’s continual weight change, auto-titrating CPAP may be the best option, she said.

There is “some limited data that treatment improves maternal outcomes, and we’re still working on trying to get better data and more solid recommendations,” Dr. D’Ambrosio said. There currently are no guidelines covering the diagnosis and management of OSA during pregnancy.

“We’ve come a long way ... but we still have more to do,” she said. “We have a long way to go to getting [OSA in pregnant women] well recognized, with screening techniques and diagnosis.”

Asked after the meeting about Dr. D’Ambrosio’s messages, Anita Rajagopal, MD, said that OSA screening during pregnancy needs to be improved through more collaboration “with our ob.gyn. and primary care colleagues.”

Too often, she said, “the signs and symptoms of OSA in pregnancy are written off as ‘just harmless snoring’ while in fact the patient has treatable sleep disordered breathing with potential adverse effects.” Dr. Rajagopal is department medical director for sleep medicine at Community Physician Network and medical director of the Community Health Network Sleep-Wake Disorders Center, both in Indianapolis.

Dr. D’Ambrosio reported that she has no potential conflicts of interest related to the material she presented, and Dr. Rajagopal stated she has no potential conflicts of interest.

Obesity hypoventilation syndrome (OHS) is bound to be increasing because of the rising obesity epidemic but is underrecognized and “frequently underdiagnosed,” Saiprakash B. Venkateshiah, MD, said at the virtual annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies.

The condition, which can cause significant morbidity and mortality, is defined by the combination of obesity and awake alveolar hypoventilation (PaCO₂ ≥45 mm Hg), with the exclusion of alternate causes of hypoventilation. Sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) is almost universally present, with approximately 90% of individuals with OHS also having obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), most often severe, and approximately 10% having sleep-related hypoventilation, or a “pure hypoventilation subtype, if you will,” said Dr. Venkateshiah, assistant professor of medicine at Emory University, Atlanta.

The prevalence of OHS in the general population is unknown, but its prevalence in patients who present for the evaluation of SDB has ranged from 8%-20% across multiple studies, he said. Up to 40% of patients with OHS present for the first time with acute hypercapnic respiratory failure, which has an in-hospital mortality of 18%.

Postmenopausal women appear to have a higher prevalence, compared with premenopausal women and men, he noted, and women appear to be more likely than men to present with the clinical phenotype of OHS without associated OSA.

The arterial blood gas measurement needed to document alveolar hypoventilation and definitively diagnosis OHA is a “simple and economical test,” he said, “but it is logistically very difficult to obtain [these measurements] routinely in all patients in the clinic ... and is one of the reasons why OSH is underdiagnosed.”
 

Guideline advice

A practice guideline published in 2019 by the American Thoracic Society suggests that, for obese patients with SDB and a low to moderate probability of having OSH, a serum bicarbonate level be measured first. “In patients with serum bicarbonate less than 27 mmol/L, clinicians might forgo measuring PaCO₂, as the diagnosis in them is very unlikely,” Dr. Venkateshiah said, referring to the guideline. “In patients with a serum bicarbonate greater than 27, you might need to measure PaCO₂ to confirm or rule out the diagnosis of OHS.”

(Patients strongly suspected of having OHS, with more than a low to moderate probability – those in whom arterial blood gases should be measured – are “usually severely obese with typical signs and symptoms such as dyspnea, nocturia, lower-extremity edema, excessive daytime sleepiness, fatigue, loud disruptive snoring, witnessed apneas, as well as mild hypoxemia during wake and/or significant hypoxemia during sleep,” the ATS guideline says.)

The guideline panel considered the use of oxygen saturation measured with pulse oximetry during wakefulness to screen for OHS and decided to advise against it because of the paucity of evidence-based literature, Dr. Venkateshiah noted. (In making its five conditional recommendations, the guideline panel cited an overall very low quality of evidence.)

Symptoms of OHS overlap with those of OSA (for example, daytime hypersomnolence, witnessed apneas, loud snoring, and morning headaches), so “symptoms alone cannot be used to discriminate between the two disorders,” he advised. Signs of OHS commonly seen in clinical exams, however, are low resting daytime oxygen saturations and lower-extremity edema. A sleep study, he added, is needed to document and characterize SDB in patients with OHS.

Positive airway pressure therapy is the first-line treatment for OHS, and long-term outcomes of patients with OHS on PAP treatment are significantly better, compared with untreated individuals. There is no strong evidence to recommend one form of PAP therapy over another for patients with OHS and concomitant severe OSA, he said, but “the bottom line” from both short- and long-term randomized clinical trials comparing CPAP with noninvasive ventilation “is that CPAP is equivalent to noninvasive ventilation as far as outcomes are concerned.”

The ATS guideline panel recommends continuous positive airway pressure therapy for patients with OHS and severe OSA. And for OHS with nonsevere OSA, bilevel PAP is traditionally used – including pure hypoventilators, Dr. Venkateshiah said.

Weight-loss interventions are paramount, since “the primary driver of OHS is obesity,” he said at the meeting. There are only a few studies that have looked at bariatric surgery in patients with OHS, he said, “but they did note significant improvements in gas exchange, sleep apnea, lung volumes and pulmonary hypertension.”

The ATS guideline suggests weight-loss interventions that produce sustained weight loss of 25%-30% of the actual body weight. Such interventions are “most likely required to achieve resolution of hypoventilation,” Dr. Venkateshiah said.
 

OHS vs. COPD

In a separate presentation on OHS, Michelle Cao, DO, clinical associate professor at Stanford (Calif.) University, emphasized the importance of distinguishing the patient with OHS from the patient with hypercapnic chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Spirometry and the flow volume curve can help rule out hypercapnic COPD and other conditions that cause daytime hypoventilation.

A study published in 2016 of 600 hospitalized patients determined to have unequivocal OHS found that 43% had been misdiagnosed as having COPD and none had been previously diagnosed with OHS, Dr. Cao noted. Patients in the study had a mean age of 58 and a mean body mass index of 48.2 kg/m²; 64% were women.

Dr. Venkateshiah and Dr. Cao had no relevant disclosures.

Obesity hypoventilation syndrome (OHS) is bound to be increasing because of the rising obesity epidemic but is underrecognized and “frequently underdiagnosed,” Saiprakash B. Venkateshiah, MD, said at the virtual annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies.

The condition, which can cause significant morbidity and mortality, is defined by the combination of obesity and awake alveolar hypoventilation (PaCO₂ ≥45 mm Hg), with the exclusion of alternate causes of hypoventilation. Sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) is almost universally present, with approximately 90% of individuals with OHS also having obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), most often severe, and approximately 10% having sleep-related hypoventilation, or a “pure hypoventilation subtype, if you will,” said Dr. Venkateshiah, assistant professor of medicine at Emory University, Atlanta.

The prevalence of OHS in the general population is unknown, but its prevalence in patients who present for the evaluation of SDB has ranged from 8%-20% across multiple studies, he said. Up to 40% of patients with OHS present for the first time with acute hypercapnic respiratory failure, which has an in-hospital mortality of 18%.

Postmenopausal women appear to have a higher prevalence, compared with premenopausal women and men, he noted, and women appear to be more likely than men to present with the clinical phenotype of OHS without associated OSA.

The arterial blood gas measurement needed to document alveolar hypoventilation and definitively diagnosis OHA is a “simple and economical test,” he said, “but it is logistically very difficult to obtain [these measurements] routinely in all patients in the clinic ... and is one of the reasons why OSH is underdiagnosed.”
 

Guideline advice

A practice guideline published in 2019 by the American Thoracic Society suggests that, for obese patients with SDB and a low to moderate probability of having OSH, a serum bicarbonate level be measured first. “In patients with serum bicarbonate less than 27 mmol/L, clinicians might forgo measuring PaCO₂, as the diagnosis in them is very unlikely,” Dr. Venkateshiah said, referring to the guideline. “In patients with a serum bicarbonate greater than 27, you might need to measure PaCO₂ to confirm or rule out the diagnosis of OHS.”

(Patients strongly suspected of having OHS, with more than a low to moderate probability – those in whom arterial blood gases should be measured – are “usually severely obese with typical signs and symptoms such as dyspnea, nocturia, lower-extremity edema, excessive daytime sleepiness, fatigue, loud disruptive snoring, witnessed apneas, as well as mild hypoxemia during wake and/or significant hypoxemia during sleep,” the ATS guideline says.)

The guideline panel considered the use of oxygen saturation measured with pulse oximetry during wakefulness to screen for OHS and decided to advise against it because of the paucity of evidence-based literature, Dr. Venkateshiah noted. (In making its five conditional recommendations, the guideline panel cited an overall very low quality of evidence.)

Symptoms of OHS overlap with those of OSA (for example, daytime hypersomnolence, witnessed apneas, loud snoring, and morning headaches), so “symptoms alone cannot be used to discriminate between the two disorders,” he advised. Signs of OHS commonly seen in clinical exams, however, are low resting daytime oxygen saturations and lower-extremity edema. A sleep study, he added, is needed to document and characterize SDB in patients with OHS.

Positive airway pressure therapy is the first-line treatment for OHS, and long-term outcomes of patients with OHS on PAP treatment are significantly better, compared with untreated individuals. There is no strong evidence to recommend one form of PAP therapy over another for patients with OHS and concomitant severe OSA, he said, but “the bottom line” from both short- and long-term randomized clinical trials comparing CPAP with noninvasive ventilation “is that CPAP is equivalent to noninvasive ventilation as far as outcomes are concerned.”

The ATS guideline panel recommends continuous positive airway pressure therapy for patients with OHS and severe OSA. And for OHS with nonsevere OSA, bilevel PAP is traditionally used – including pure hypoventilators, Dr. Venkateshiah said.

Weight-loss interventions are paramount, since “the primary driver of OHS is obesity,” he said at the meeting. There are only a few studies that have looked at bariatric surgery in patients with OHS, he said, “but they did note significant improvements in gas exchange, sleep apnea, lung volumes and pulmonary hypertension.”

The ATS guideline suggests weight-loss interventions that produce sustained weight loss of 25%-30% of the actual body weight. Such interventions are “most likely required to achieve resolution of hypoventilation,” Dr. Venkateshiah said.
 

OHS vs. COPD

In a separate presentation on OHS, Michelle Cao, DO, clinical associate professor at Stanford (Calif.) University, emphasized the importance of distinguishing the patient with OHS from the patient with hypercapnic chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Spirometry and the flow volume curve can help rule out hypercapnic COPD and other conditions that cause daytime hypoventilation.

A study published in 2016 of 600 hospitalized patients determined to have unequivocal OHS found that 43% had been misdiagnosed as having COPD and none had been previously diagnosed with OHS, Dr. Cao noted. Patients in the study had a mean age of 58 and a mean body mass index of 48.2 kg/m²; 64% were women.

Dr. Venkateshiah and Dr. Cao had no relevant disclosures.

Obesity hypoventilation syndrome (OHS) is bound to be increasing because of the rising obesity epidemic but is underrecognized and “frequently underdiagnosed,” Saiprakash B. Venkateshiah, MD, said at the virtual annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies.

The condition, which can cause significant morbidity and mortality, is defined by the combination of obesity and awake alveolar hypoventilation (PaCO₂ ≥45 mm Hg), with the exclusion of alternate causes of hypoventilation. Sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) is almost universally present, with approximately 90% of individuals with OHS also having obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), most often severe, and approximately 10% having sleep-related hypoventilation, or a “pure hypoventilation subtype, if you will,” said Dr. Venkateshiah, assistant professor of medicine at Emory University, Atlanta.

The prevalence of OHS in the general population is unknown, but its prevalence in patients who present for the evaluation of SDB has ranged from 8%-20% across multiple studies, he said. Up to 40% of patients with OHS present for the first time with acute hypercapnic respiratory failure, which has an in-hospital mortality of 18%.

Postmenopausal women appear to have a higher prevalence, compared with premenopausal women and men, he noted, and women appear to be more likely than men to present with the clinical phenotype of OHS without associated OSA.

The arterial blood gas measurement needed to document alveolar hypoventilation and definitively diagnosis OHA is a “simple and economical test,” he said, “but it is logistically very difficult to obtain [these measurements] routinely in all patients in the clinic ... and is one of the reasons why OSH is underdiagnosed.”
 

Guideline advice

A practice guideline published in 2019 by the American Thoracic Society suggests that, for obese patients with SDB and a low to moderate probability of having OSH, a serum bicarbonate level be measured first. “In patients with serum bicarbonate less than 27 mmol/L, clinicians might forgo measuring PaCO₂, as the diagnosis in them is very unlikely,” Dr. Venkateshiah said, referring to the guideline. “In patients with a serum bicarbonate greater than 27, you might need to measure PaCO₂ to confirm or rule out the diagnosis of OHS.”

(Patients strongly suspected of having OHS, with more than a low to moderate probability – those in whom arterial blood gases should be measured – are “usually severely obese with typical signs and symptoms such as dyspnea, nocturia, lower-extremity edema, excessive daytime sleepiness, fatigue, loud disruptive snoring, witnessed apneas, as well as mild hypoxemia during wake and/or significant hypoxemia during sleep,” the ATS guideline says.)

The guideline panel considered the use of oxygen saturation measured with pulse oximetry during wakefulness to screen for OHS and decided to advise against it because of the paucity of evidence-based literature, Dr. Venkateshiah noted. (In making its five conditional recommendations, the guideline panel cited an overall very low quality of evidence.)

Symptoms of OHS overlap with those of OSA (for example, daytime hypersomnolence, witnessed apneas, loud snoring, and morning headaches), so “symptoms alone cannot be used to discriminate between the two disorders,” he advised. Signs of OHS commonly seen in clinical exams, however, are low resting daytime oxygen saturations and lower-extremity edema. A sleep study, he added, is needed to document and characterize SDB in patients with OHS.

Positive airway pressure therapy is the first-line treatment for OHS, and long-term outcomes of patients with OHS on PAP treatment are significantly better, compared with untreated individuals. There is no strong evidence to recommend one form of PAP therapy over another for patients with OHS and concomitant severe OSA, he said, but “the bottom line” from both short- and long-term randomized clinical trials comparing CPAP with noninvasive ventilation “is that CPAP is equivalent to noninvasive ventilation as far as outcomes are concerned.”

The ATS guideline panel recommends continuous positive airway pressure therapy for patients with OHS and severe OSA. And for OHS with nonsevere OSA, bilevel PAP is traditionally used – including pure hypoventilators, Dr. Venkateshiah said.

Weight-loss interventions are paramount, since “the primary driver of OHS is obesity,” he said at the meeting. There are only a few studies that have looked at bariatric surgery in patients with OHS, he said, “but they did note significant improvements in gas exchange, sleep apnea, lung volumes and pulmonary hypertension.”

The ATS guideline suggests weight-loss interventions that produce sustained weight loss of 25%-30% of the actual body weight. Such interventions are “most likely required to achieve resolution of hypoventilation,” Dr. Venkateshiah said.
 

OHS vs. COPD

In a separate presentation on OHS, Michelle Cao, DO, clinical associate professor at Stanford (Calif.) University, emphasized the importance of distinguishing the patient with OHS from the patient with hypercapnic chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Spirometry and the flow volume curve can help rule out hypercapnic COPD and other conditions that cause daytime hypoventilation.

A study published in 2016 of 600 hospitalized patients determined to have unequivocal OHS found that 43% had been misdiagnosed as having COPD and none had been previously diagnosed with OHS, Dr. Cao noted. Patients in the study had a mean age of 58 and a mean body mass index of 48.2 kg/m²; 64% were women.

Dr. Venkateshiah and Dr. Cao had no relevant disclosures.

With vaccination rates increasing and new infections declining, we all hope the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic is over (fingers crossed really tight). Regardless, the post–COVID-19 syndrome pandemic has already begun. What is post–COVID-19 syndrome (or long-haulers or long-COVID)? Is it standard postviral fatigue? Prolonged deconditioning following debilitating illness? Permanent lung or vascular injury? Common sense and past experience say it’s all of these.

In theory, the burden of actual lung injury post COVID-19 should be the easiest to quantify, so let’s discuss what we think we know. I’ve heard experts break post–COVID-19 lung injury into three broad categories:

• Preexisting lung disease that is exacerbated by acute COVID-19 infection.
• Acute COVID-19 infection that causes acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) or other acute lung injury (ALI).
• Non–critically ill acute COVID-19 with residual lung damage and abnormal repair.

These categories are necessarily imprecise, making it challenging to fit some patients neatly into a single definition.

For patients in the first category, management will be dictated largely by the nature of the preexisting lung disease. For those in category two, we already know a lot about what their recovery from ARDS will look like. There’s no longer reason to believe that COVID-19–related ARDS is particularly unique, and all things being equal, lung recovery should mimic that seen with non–COVID-19 ARDS.

It’s going to take patience and time, and beyond targeted rehabilitation it’s not clear that we have anything available to expedite the process.

The third category of patients is the most intriguing. Is there a group of patients who have residual lung injury but didn’t have evident ARDS/ALI during their acute COVID-19 infection? Anecdotally we think so, but we know little about prevalence and less about management. A recent study published in Annals of the American Thoracic Society addresses both issues. In an observational report on patients recovering after being hospitalized with COVID-19 infection, the authors found that 3.6% of patients had residual lung injury that improved with 3 weeks of corticosteroid treatment.

The report is timely and helpful but hardly definitive. It’s observational, and patients required extensive screening and identification by a multidisciplinary committee of experts in interstitial lung disease. Patients were diagnosed as having organizing pneumonia (OP) as their “lung injury” if certain radiographic criteria were met. There were no biopsies. Last, there was no control group. Still, this report is critically important. It tells us that at 6 weeks post discharge, about 3.6% of patients who were hospitalized for COVID-19 will have persistent symptoms, radiographic abnormalities, and a plateau in their recovery.

Beyond that, it tells us little. Did these patients really have OP? It’s impossible to know. The CT findings used to establish the diagnosis are nonspecific. Response to steroids is consistent with OP, but the treatment course was quite short. If truly OP, one would expect a high relapse rate after steroid withdrawal. Patients weren’t followed long enough to monitor recurrence rates. Also, as appropriately discussed in the accompanying editorial, there’s no control group so we can’t know whether the patients treated with steroids would have recovered without treatment. There was objective improvement in lung function for the two to three patients they followed who did not receive steroids. However, it was of lesser magnitude than in the steroid group.

Post–COVID-19 symptoms will remain a challenge for the foreseeable future. More than 30 million patients have been diagnosed with COVID-19 in the United States and close to half will experience persistent dyspnea. Putting the numbers together, I conclude that the vast majority will not have identifiable lung injury that will benefit from steroids. I wish I could prescribe patience to both physicians and patients.

Dr. Holley is associate professor of medicine at Uniformed Services University and program director of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. He covers a wide range of topics in pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine.
 

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

With vaccination rates increasing and new infections declining, we all hope the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic is over (fingers crossed really tight). Regardless, the post–COVID-19 syndrome pandemic has already begun. What is post–COVID-19 syndrome (or long-haulers or long-COVID)? Is it standard postviral fatigue? Prolonged deconditioning following debilitating illness? Permanent lung or vascular injury? Common sense and past experience say it’s all of these.

In theory, the burden of actual lung injury post COVID-19 should be the easiest to quantify, so let’s discuss what we think we know. I’ve heard experts break post–COVID-19 lung injury into three broad categories:

• Preexisting lung disease that is exacerbated by acute COVID-19 infection.
• Acute COVID-19 infection that causes acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) or other acute lung injury (ALI).
• Non–critically ill acute COVID-19 with residual lung damage and abnormal repair.

These categories are necessarily imprecise, making it challenging to fit some patients neatly into a single definition.

For patients in the first category, management will be dictated largely by the nature of the preexisting lung disease. For those in category two, we already know a lot about what their recovery from ARDS will look like. There’s no longer reason to believe that COVID-19–related ARDS is particularly unique, and all things being equal, lung recovery should mimic that seen with non–COVID-19 ARDS.

It’s going to take patience and time, and beyond targeted rehabilitation it’s not clear that we have anything available to expedite the process.

The third category of patients is the most intriguing. Is there a group of patients who have residual lung injury but didn’t have evident ARDS/ALI during their acute COVID-19 infection? Anecdotally we think so, but we know little about prevalence and less about management. A recent study published in Annals of the American Thoracic Society addresses both issues. In an observational report on patients recovering after being hospitalized with COVID-19 infection, the authors found that 3.6% of patients had residual lung injury that improved with 3 weeks of corticosteroid treatment.

The report is timely and helpful but hardly definitive. It’s observational, and patients required extensive screening and identification by a multidisciplinary committee of experts in interstitial lung disease. Patients were diagnosed as having organizing pneumonia (OP) as their “lung injury” if certain radiographic criteria were met. There were no biopsies. Last, there was no control group. Still, this report is critically important. It tells us that at 6 weeks post discharge, about 3.6% of patients who were hospitalized for COVID-19 will have persistent symptoms, radiographic abnormalities, and a plateau in their recovery.

Beyond that, it tells us little. Did these patients really have OP? It’s impossible to know. The CT findings used to establish the diagnosis are nonspecific. Response to steroids is consistent with OP, but the treatment course was quite short. If truly OP, one would expect a high relapse rate after steroid withdrawal. Patients weren’t followed long enough to monitor recurrence rates. Also, as appropriately discussed in the accompanying editorial, there’s no control group so we can’t know whether the patients treated with steroids would have recovered without treatment. There was objective improvement in lung function for the two to three patients they followed who did not receive steroids. However, it was of lesser magnitude than in the steroid group.

Post–COVID-19 symptoms will remain a challenge for the foreseeable future. More than 30 million patients have been diagnosed with COVID-19 in the United States and close to half will experience persistent dyspnea. Putting the numbers together, I conclude that the vast majority will not have identifiable lung injury that will benefit from steroids. I wish I could prescribe patience to both physicians and patients.

Dr. Holley is associate professor of medicine at Uniformed Services University and program director of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. He covers a wide range of topics in pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine.
 

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

With vaccination rates increasing and new infections declining, we all hope the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic is over (fingers crossed really tight). Regardless, the post–COVID-19 syndrome pandemic has already begun. What is post–COVID-19 syndrome (or long-haulers or long-COVID)? Is it standard postviral fatigue? Prolonged deconditioning following debilitating illness? Permanent lung or vascular injury? Common sense and past experience say it’s all of these.

In theory, the burden of actual lung injury post COVID-19 should be the easiest to quantify, so let’s discuss what we think we know. I’ve heard experts break post–COVID-19 lung injury into three broad categories:

• Preexisting lung disease that is exacerbated by acute COVID-19 infection.
• Acute COVID-19 infection that causes acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) or other acute lung injury (ALI).
• Non–critically ill acute COVID-19 with residual lung damage and abnormal repair.

These categories are necessarily imprecise, making it challenging to fit some patients neatly into a single definition.

For patients in the first category, management will be dictated largely by the nature of the preexisting lung disease. For those in category two, we already know a lot about what their recovery from ARDS will look like. There’s no longer reason to believe that COVID-19–related ARDS is particularly unique, and all things being equal, lung recovery should mimic that seen with non–COVID-19 ARDS.

It’s going to take patience and time, and beyond targeted rehabilitation it’s not clear that we have anything available to expedite the process.

The third category of patients is the most intriguing. Is there a group of patients who have residual lung injury but didn’t have evident ARDS/ALI during their acute COVID-19 infection? Anecdotally we think so, but we know little about prevalence and less about management. A recent study published in Annals of the American Thoracic Society addresses both issues. In an observational report on patients recovering after being hospitalized with COVID-19 infection, the authors found that 3.6% of patients had residual lung injury that improved with 3 weeks of corticosteroid treatment.

The report is timely and helpful but hardly definitive. It’s observational, and patients required extensive screening and identification by a multidisciplinary committee of experts in interstitial lung disease. Patients were diagnosed as having organizing pneumonia (OP) as their “lung injury” if certain radiographic criteria were met. There were no biopsies. Last, there was no control group. Still, this report is critically important. It tells us that at 6 weeks post discharge, about 3.6% of patients who were hospitalized for COVID-19 will have persistent symptoms, radiographic abnormalities, and a plateau in their recovery.

Beyond that, it tells us little. Did these patients really have OP? It’s impossible to know. The CT findings used to establish the diagnosis are nonspecific. Response to steroids is consistent with OP, but the treatment course was quite short. If truly OP, one would expect a high relapse rate after steroid withdrawal. Patients weren’t followed long enough to monitor recurrence rates. Also, as appropriately discussed in the accompanying editorial, there’s no control group so we can’t know whether the patients treated with steroids would have recovered without treatment. There was objective improvement in lung function for the two to three patients they followed who did not receive steroids. However, it was of lesser magnitude than in the steroid group.

Post–COVID-19 symptoms will remain a challenge for the foreseeable future. More than 30 million patients have been diagnosed with COVID-19 in the United States and close to half will experience persistent dyspnea. Putting the numbers together, I conclude that the vast majority will not have identifiable lung injury that will benefit from steroids. I wish I could prescribe patience to both physicians and patients.

Dr. Holley is associate professor of medicine at Uniformed Services University and program director of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. He covers a wide range of topics in pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine.
 

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Background: Management of primary spontaneous pneumothorax is usually with the insertion of a chest tube and typically requires hospitalization. This procedure can result in pain, organ injury, bleeding, and infection, and, if unresolved, may require surgery, introducing additional risks and complications. Few data exist from randomized trials comparing conservative versus interventional management.

In complete-case analysis, 129 out of 131 (98.5%) patients in the intervention group had resolution within 8 weeks, compared with 118 of 125 (94.4%) in the conservative group (risk difference, –4.1 percentage points; 95% confidence interval, –8.6 to 0.5, P = .02 for noninferiority).

In sensitivity analysis, in which missing data after the 8-week period were imputed as treatment failures, re-expansion occurred in 129 out of 138 (93.5%) patients in the intervention group and 118 out of 143 (82.5%) in the conservative group (risk difference, –11.0 percentage points; 95% CI, –18.4 to –3.5), which is outside the noninferiority margin of –9.0.

Overall, 41 patients in the intervention group and 13 in the conservative group had at least one adverse event.

Bottom line: Missing data limit the ability to make strong conclusions, but this trial suggests that conservative management of primary spontaneous pneumothorax was noninferior to interventional management with lower risk of serious adverse events.

Citation: Brown SG et al. Conservative versus interventional treatment for spontaneous pneumothorax. N Engl J Med. 2020; 382:405-15.

Dr. Schmit is a hospitalist and associate professor of medicine at University of Texas Health, San Antonio.

Background: Management of primary spontaneous pneumothorax is usually with the insertion of a chest tube and typically requires hospitalization. This procedure can result in pain, organ injury, bleeding, and infection, and, if unresolved, may require surgery, introducing additional risks and complications. Few data exist from randomized trials comparing conservative versus interventional management.

In complete-case analysis, 129 out of 131 (98.5%) patients in the intervention group had resolution within 8 weeks, compared with 118 of 125 (94.4%) in the conservative group (risk difference, –4.1 percentage points; 95% confidence interval, –8.6 to 0.5, P = .02 for noninferiority).

In sensitivity analysis, in which missing data after the 8-week period were imputed as treatment failures, re-expansion occurred in 129 out of 138 (93.5%) patients in the intervention group and 118 out of 143 (82.5%) in the conservative group (risk difference, –11.0 percentage points; 95% CI, –18.4 to –3.5), which is outside the noninferiority margin of –9.0.

Overall, 41 patients in the intervention group and 13 in the conservative group had at least one adverse event.

Bottom line: Missing data limit the ability to make strong conclusions, but this trial suggests that conservative management of primary spontaneous pneumothorax was noninferior to interventional management with lower risk of serious adverse events.

Citation: Brown SG et al. Conservative versus interventional treatment for spontaneous pneumothorax. N Engl J Med. 2020; 382:405-15.

Dr. Schmit is a hospitalist and associate professor of medicine at University of Texas Health, San Antonio.

Background: Management of primary spontaneous pneumothorax is usually with the insertion of a chest tube and typically requires hospitalization. This procedure can result in pain, organ injury, bleeding, and infection, and, if unresolved, may require surgery, introducing additional risks and complications. Few data exist from randomized trials comparing conservative versus interventional management.

In complete-case analysis, 129 out of 131 (98.5%) patients in the intervention group had resolution within 8 weeks, compared with 118 of 125 (94.4%) in the conservative group (risk difference, –4.1 percentage points; 95% confidence interval, –8.6 to 0.5, P = .02 for noninferiority).

In sensitivity analysis, in which missing data after the 8-week period were imputed as treatment failures, re-expansion occurred in 129 out of 138 (93.5%) patients in the intervention group and 118 out of 143 (82.5%) in the conservative group (risk difference, –11.0 percentage points; 95% CI, –18.4 to –3.5), which is outside the noninferiority margin of –9.0.

Overall, 41 patients in the intervention group and 13 in the conservative group had at least one adverse event.

Bottom line: Missing data limit the ability to make strong conclusions, but this trial suggests that conservative management of primary spontaneous pneumothorax was noninferior to interventional management with lower risk of serious adverse events.

Citation: Brown SG et al. Conservative versus interventional treatment for spontaneous pneumothorax. N Engl J Med. 2020; 382:405-15.

Dr. Schmit is a hospitalist and associate professor of medicine at University of Texas Health, San Antonio.

Pfizer is suspending distribution of the antismoking treatment Chantix after heightened levels of the carcinogen N-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA) were found in some lots of the pills.

The pharmaceutical company is also recalling some lots of Chantix that may have high levels of NDMA, Reuters reported.

Pfizer told Reuters the distribution pause was ordered out of abundance of caution while further testing is conducted. The FDA approved varenicline, which is marketed as Chantix, in 2006.

“The benefits of Chantix outweigh the very low potential risks, if any, posed by nitrosamine exposure from varenicline on top of other common sources over a lifetime,” Pfizer spokesperson Steven Danehy said in an email, according to Reuters.

The FDA has not issued a recall on Chantix. In Canada, however, health authorities on June 8 instituted a recall for Champix, the name under which the drug is sold in that nation.

The Chantix website says it’s a 3- to 6-month treatment that helps people overcome the need to smoke tobacco. The website says more than 13 million people have been prescribed Chantix.

Other health concerns have been raised about Chantix, such as mental health side effects.

In 2016, however, researchers concluded Chantix did not appear to raise the risk of serious health disorders such as depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts.

A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.

Pfizer is suspending distribution of the antismoking treatment Chantix after heightened levels of the carcinogen N-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA) were found in some lots of the pills.

The pharmaceutical company is also recalling some lots of Chantix that may have high levels of NDMA, Reuters reported.

Pfizer told Reuters the distribution pause was ordered out of abundance of caution while further testing is conducted. The FDA approved varenicline, which is marketed as Chantix, in 2006.

“The benefits of Chantix outweigh the very low potential risks, if any, posed by nitrosamine exposure from varenicline on top of other common sources over a lifetime,” Pfizer spokesperson Steven Danehy said in an email, according to Reuters.

The FDA has not issued a recall on Chantix. In Canada, however, health authorities on June 8 instituted a recall for Champix, the name under which the drug is sold in that nation.

The Chantix website says it’s a 3- to 6-month treatment that helps people overcome the need to smoke tobacco. The website says more than 13 million people have been prescribed Chantix.

Other health concerns have been raised about Chantix, such as mental health side effects.

In 2016, however, researchers concluded Chantix did not appear to raise the risk of serious health disorders such as depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts.

A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.

Pfizer is suspending distribution of the antismoking treatment Chantix after heightened levels of the carcinogen N-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA) were found in some lots of the pills.

The pharmaceutical company is also recalling some lots of Chantix that may have high levels of NDMA, Reuters reported.

Pfizer told Reuters the distribution pause was ordered out of abundance of caution while further testing is conducted. The FDA approved varenicline, which is marketed as Chantix, in 2006.

“The benefits of Chantix outweigh the very low potential risks, if any, posed by nitrosamine exposure from varenicline on top of other common sources over a lifetime,” Pfizer spokesperson Steven Danehy said in an email, according to Reuters.

The FDA has not issued a recall on Chantix. In Canada, however, health authorities on June 8 instituted a recall for Champix, the name under which the drug is sold in that nation.

The Chantix website says it’s a 3- to 6-month treatment that helps people overcome the need to smoke tobacco. The website says more than 13 million people have been prescribed Chantix.

Other health concerns have been raised about Chantix, such as mental health side effects.

In 2016, however, researchers concluded Chantix did not appear to raise the risk of serious health disorders such as depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts.

A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.

As doctors struggled through several surges of COVID-19 infections, most of what we learned was acquired through real-life experience. While many treatment options were promoted, most flat-out failed to be real therapeutics at all. Now that we have a safe and effective vaccine, we can prevent many infections from this virus. However, we are still left to manage the many post-COVID symptoms our patients continue to suffer with.

Symptoms following infection can last for months and range widely from “brain fog,” fatigue, dyspnea, chest pain, generalized weakness, depression, and a host of others. Patients may experience one or all of these symptoms, and there is currently no good way to predict who will go on to become a COVID “long hauler”.

Following the example of being educated by COVID as it happened, the same is true for managing post-COVID symptoms. The medical community still has a poor understanding of why some people develop it and there are few evidence-based studies to support any treatment modalities.

Earlier this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a set of clinical guidelines addressing treatment of post-COVID symptoms, which they define as “new, recurring, or ongoing symptoms more than 4 weeks after infection, sometimes after initial symptom recovery.” It is important to note that these symptoms can occur in any degree of sickness during the acute infection, including in those who were asymptomatic. Even the actual name of this post-COVID syndrome is still being developed, with several other names being used for it as well.

While the guidelines are quite extensive, the actual clinical recommendations are still vague. For example, it is advised to let the patient know that post-COVID symptoms are still not well understood. While it is important to be transparent with patients, this does little to reassure them. Patients look to doctors, especially their primary care physicians, to guide them on the best treatment paths. Yet, we currently have none for post-COVID syndrome.

It is also advised to treat the patients’ symptoms and help improve functioning. For many diseases, doctors like to get to the root cause of the problem. Treating a symptom often masks an underlying condition. It may make the patient feel better and improve what they are capable of doing, which is important, but it also fails to unmask the real problem. It is also important to note that symptoms can be out of proportion to clinical findings and should not be dismissed: we just don’t have the answers yet.

One helpful recommendation is having a patient keep a diary of their symptoms. This will help both the patient and doctor learn what may be triggering factors. If it is, for example, exertion that induces breathlessness, perhaps the patient can gradually increase their level of activity to minimize symptoms. Additionally, a “comprehensive rehabilitation program” is also advised and this can greatly assist addressing all the issues a patient is experiencing, physically and medically.

It is also advised that management of underlying medical conditions be optimized. While this is very important, it is not something specific to post-COVID syndrome: All patients should have their underlying medical conditions well controlled. It might be that the patient is paying more attention to their overall health, which is a good thing. However, this does not necessarily reduce the current symptoms a patient is experiencing.

The CDC makes a good attempt to offer guidance in the frustrating management of post-COVID syndrome. However, their clinical guidelines fail to offer specific management tools specific to treating post-COVID patients. The recommendations offered are more helpful to health in general. The fact that more specific recommendations are lacking is simply caused by the lack of knowledge of this condition at present. As more research is conducted and more knowledge obtained, new guidelines should become more detailed.

Dr. Girgis practices family medicine in South River, N.J., and is a clinical assistant professor of family medicine at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, New Brunswick, N.J. You can contact her at [email protected].

As doctors struggled through several surges of COVID-19 infections, most of what we learned was acquired through real-life experience. While many treatment options were promoted, most flat-out failed to be real therapeutics at all. Now that we have a safe and effective vaccine, we can prevent many infections from this virus. However, we are still left to manage the many post-COVID symptoms our patients continue to suffer with.

Symptoms following infection can last for months and range widely from “brain fog,” fatigue, dyspnea, chest pain, generalized weakness, depression, and a host of others. Patients may experience one or all of these symptoms, and there is currently no good way to predict who will go on to become a COVID “long hauler”.

Following the example of being educated by COVID as it happened, the same is true for managing post-COVID symptoms. The medical community still has a poor understanding of why some people develop it and there are few evidence-based studies to support any treatment modalities.

Earlier this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a set of clinical guidelines addressing treatment of post-COVID symptoms, which they define as “new, recurring, or ongoing symptoms more than 4 weeks after infection, sometimes after initial symptom recovery.” It is important to note that these symptoms can occur in any degree of sickness during the acute infection, including in those who were asymptomatic. Even the actual name of this post-COVID syndrome is still being developed, with several other names being used for it as well.

While the guidelines are quite extensive, the actual clinical recommendations are still vague. For example, it is advised to let the patient know that post-COVID symptoms are still not well understood. While it is important to be transparent with patients, this does little to reassure them. Patients look to doctors, especially their primary care physicians, to guide them on the best treatment paths. Yet, we currently have none for post-COVID syndrome.

It is also advised to treat the patients’ symptoms and help improve functioning. For many diseases, doctors like to get to the root cause of the problem. Treating a symptom often masks an underlying condition. It may make the patient feel better and improve what they are capable of doing, which is important, but it also fails to unmask the real problem. It is also important to note that symptoms can be out of proportion to clinical findings and should not be dismissed: we just don’t have the answers yet.

One helpful recommendation is having a patient keep a diary of their symptoms. This will help both the patient and doctor learn what may be triggering factors. If it is, for example, exertion that induces breathlessness, perhaps the patient can gradually increase their level of activity to minimize symptoms. Additionally, a “comprehensive rehabilitation program” is also advised and this can greatly assist addressing all the issues a patient is experiencing, physically and medically.

It is also advised that management of underlying medical conditions be optimized. While this is very important, it is not something specific to post-COVID syndrome: All patients should have their underlying medical conditions well controlled. It might be that the patient is paying more attention to their overall health, which is a good thing. However, this does not necessarily reduce the current symptoms a patient is experiencing.

The CDC makes a good attempt to offer guidance in the frustrating management of post-COVID syndrome. However, their clinical guidelines fail to offer specific management tools specific to treating post-COVID patients. The recommendations offered are more helpful to health in general. The fact that more specific recommendations are lacking is simply caused by the lack of knowledge of this condition at present. As more research is conducted and more knowledge obtained, new guidelines should become more detailed.

Dr. Girgis practices family medicine in South River, N.J., and is a clinical assistant professor of family medicine at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, New Brunswick, N.J. You can contact her at [email protected].

As doctors struggled through several surges of COVID-19 infections, most of what we learned was acquired through real-life experience. While many treatment options were promoted, most flat-out failed to be real therapeutics at all. Now that we have a safe and effective vaccine, we can prevent many infections from this virus. However, we are still left to manage the many post-COVID symptoms our patients continue to suffer with.

Symptoms following infection can last for months and range widely from “brain fog,” fatigue, dyspnea, chest pain, generalized weakness, depression, and a host of others. Patients may experience one or all of these symptoms, and there is currently no good way to predict who will go on to become a COVID “long hauler”.

Following the example of being educated by COVID as it happened, the same is true for managing post-COVID symptoms. The medical community still has a poor understanding of why some people develop it and there are few evidence-based studies to support any treatment modalities.

Earlier this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a set of clinical guidelines addressing treatment of post-COVID symptoms, which they define as “new, recurring, or ongoing symptoms more than 4 weeks after infection, sometimes after initial symptom recovery.” It is important to note that these symptoms can occur in any degree of sickness during the acute infection, including in those who were asymptomatic. Even the actual name of this post-COVID syndrome is still being developed, with several other names being used for it as well.

While the guidelines are quite extensive, the actual clinical recommendations are still vague. For example, it is advised to let the patient know that post-COVID symptoms are still not well understood. While it is important to be transparent with patients, this does little to reassure them. Patients look to doctors, especially their primary care physicians, to guide them on the best treatment paths. Yet, we currently have none for post-COVID syndrome.

It is also advised to treat the patients’ symptoms and help improve functioning. For many diseases, doctors like to get to the root cause of the problem. Treating a symptom often masks an underlying condition. It may make the patient feel better and improve what they are capable of doing, which is important, but it also fails to unmask the real problem. It is also important to note that symptoms can be out of proportion to clinical findings and should not be dismissed: we just don’t have the answers yet.

One helpful recommendation is having a patient keep a diary of their symptoms. This will help both the patient and doctor learn what may be triggering factors. If it is, for example, exertion that induces breathlessness, perhaps the patient can gradually increase their level of activity to minimize symptoms. Additionally, a “comprehensive rehabilitation program” is also advised and this can greatly assist addressing all the issues a patient is experiencing, physically and medically.

It is also advised that management of underlying medical conditions be optimized. While this is very important, it is not something specific to post-COVID syndrome: All patients should have their underlying medical conditions well controlled. It might be that the patient is paying more attention to their overall health, which is a good thing. However, this does not necessarily reduce the current symptoms a patient is experiencing.

The CDC makes a good attempt to offer guidance in the frustrating management of post-COVID syndrome. However, their clinical guidelines fail to offer specific management tools specific to treating post-COVID patients. The recommendations offered are more helpful to health in general. The fact that more specific recommendations are lacking is simply caused by the lack of knowledge of this condition at present. As more research is conducted and more knowledge obtained, new guidelines should become more detailed.

Dr. Girgis practices family medicine in South River, N.J., and is a clinical assistant professor of family medicine at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, New Brunswick, N.J. You can contact her at [email protected].