Recommendations for Your Baby’s Ear Infection

STATES CHRONICLE – A study reveals specialists’ recommendations regarding babies’ ear infection.  The new research was published on December 22 in the New England Journal of Medicine. It unveils that shorter treatment with antibiotics for your little infant will not prove to be efficient in fully treating the ear infection. This practice may result in worse consequences than the outcomes received after a standard duration treatment.

What is more, shorter antibiotic treatment does not minimize the levels of antibiotics resistance. The findings have proved that those mothers who chose to limit the time span of antimicrobial treatment for their babies’ ear infection may risk reducing the effect of the antibiotics. Moreover, by implementing this procedure, the growth of the antimicrobial resistance may suddenly reduce.

During a medical trial developed by investigators at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, specialists gathered data about approximately 520 infants with ages between six and twenty-three months. All of them were diagnosed with severe otitis. They were split into two groups. The first group received the standard –duration treatment by using amoxicillin-clavulanate for ten days, whereas the other group received the same medicine for only five days which were followed by five more days of placebo.

Neither the children nor the parents were aware of which one of the groups they pertained to. To assess the babies, researchers thought about a phone conversation with the office visits and the parents. During the test, specialists asked the parents to rate the performance of their children based on the Acute Otitis Media-Severity of Symptoms (AOM-SOS) scale.

This scale was developed being based on seven discrete signs which could have been noticed, like irritability, fever, diminished appetite, difficulty when sleeping, decreased activity, crying and tugging at ears. If the scale shows higher scores, then the infants are severely affected by ear infections.

If the symptoms got to became even worse during the treatment, those children were listed as a clinical failure. Some of the severe symptoms may have been a bulging ear drum during the otoscopic examination. Nevertheless, researchers revealed that the risk of treatment failure was increased in those infants who were part of the group which received antibiotics for five days, compared to those who received the treatment for ten days.

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