Blood Test May Tell If You Need Antibiotics For An Infection

Such mix-ups and blunders as prescribing antibiotics for a viral infection will then be a thing of the past.

The blood test uses “gene signatures” that show which genes are turned on or off. These patterns indicate if the patient is suffering from a bacterial infection or a viral infection.

Tsalik, Woods and their team described the observational study in the January 20 issue of Science Translational Medicine.

TIME reported that different tests are now available to find out if an infection is caused by a bacterium or a virus.

According to Health Newsline, researchers at Duke University have been looking further into blood tests, particularly ones that can determine if an illness is bacterial or viral and whether medicine is necessary.

“Antibiotics treat bacteria, but they do not treat viruses”, Dr. Ephraim Tsalik, an assistant professor of medicine at Duke University, told HealthDay. Bacterial infection requires antibiotic treatment however, viral infections demand bed rest, fluids and Tylenol.

Study researchers have affirmed that there is a risk of excessive antibiotics use, to patient as well as to public health.

While this test is still in the first stages of development, Tsalik believes that the new one marks a significant breakthrough compared to what is now in use. And many of those scripts come from doctors who aren’t sure whether a patient is infected with bacteria – and needs antibiotics – or whether the illness is caused by a virus.

Overuse and over-prescription of antibiotics is causing around 2 million people to get ill every year, and causes thousands of deaths.

For the study, the researchers recruited more than 300 patients with respiratory problems from five hospitals.

While tests do exist to sort bacteria from viruses – they can take up to three days to complete, which does not present an immediate solution for people wanting relief from their symptoms. Antibiotics are widely misused around the world, which could lead to antibiotic resistance.

“The more antibiotics someone takes especially when they don’t need them exposes them to other effects on their overall health and also puts them at higher risk of developing resistant infections later on”, explains Dr. Tsalik. They are also exploring whether similar tests can detect other types of bacterial and viral infections and fungal infections.

According to researchers, such a method to determine and distinguish infections will not only reduce unnecessary use of antibiotics, but will also help provide more precise treatments of viruses.

Scientists hope that in future it will help ensure that the right patients are prescribed antibiotics.

“We are working diligently to translate the signatures we found to make them available in an hour or less using a simple approach that can be done at the patient’s bedside or in an office-based lab”, the team declared.