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Co-infection of Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Stenotrophomonas maltophilia in hospitalised pneumonia patients has a synergic and significant impact on clinical outcomes

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Abstract

Ventilator-acquired pneumonia and hospital community-acquired pneumonia are frequently caused by Gram-negative and -positive bacteria. We noted that pneumonia patients with co-infection of Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Stenotrophomonas maltophilia had a poor clinical outcome. To verify this, we retrospectively reviewed pneumonia cases at Hebei General Hospital from 2010 to 2015. These cases were grouped into four categories: (1) co-infection with P. aeruginosa and S. maltophilia, (2) infection with P. aeruginosa, (3) infection with S. maltophilia and (4) infection with none of the known pneumonia-causing pathogens. The numbers of cases in each group were 50, 40, 41 and 33, with mortality rates of 64.0%, 12.5%, 14.6% and 6.1%, respectively. The analysed results indicated that a co-infection of P. aeruginosa and S. maltophilia had a synergic impact on the mortality of pneumonia patients. Therefore, future research is needed to develop treatment strategies for the co-infected patients to reduce the rate of mortality.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the doctors and nurses of Hebei General Hospital for their detailed documentation for every case history, making this retrospective review and study possible.

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Correspondence to B. Huang.

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No external funding has been sought. All authors are employed by the relevant institutes. However, the institutional employers have no influence on the data collection, analysis and conclusions drawn in this paper.

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The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Ethical statement

This paper is based on the data from a retrospective statistical analysis of clinical records. No clinical tests were conducted and no ethical issue approval was required. However, the institutional research and ethics guidelines were observed in this retrospective study to guard the patients’ privacy and confidentiality.

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The dataset used for analyses during the current study is available from the corresponding author upon request.

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Yin, C., Yang, W., Meng, J. et al. Co-infection of Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Stenotrophomonas maltophilia in hospitalised pneumonia patients has a synergic and significant impact on clinical outcomes. Eur J Clin Microbiol Infect Dis 36, 2231–2235 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10096-017-3050-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10096-017-3050-4

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