You have full access to this open access article. This prospective observational study aimed at describing prescription patterns of tigecycline and patient outcomes in 26 French intensive care units ICU. Data of consecutive cases of adult patients treated with tigecycline were collected from the initiation until 7 days after the end of treatment.
Survival was recorded at 28 days. Median treatment duration was 9 days. Success rates tended to decrease with illness severity, immunosuppression, bacteraemia and obesity. Tigecycline success rates appear comparable to those reported in clinical studies in ICU with severe infections. Tigecycline could be an alternative in ICU patients. Tigecycline is one of the scarce available compounds, with a broad-spectrum activity, effective against multidrug-resistant strains including Gram-positive, Gram-negative aerobic, anaerobic bacteria and atypical microorganisms.
In randomised controlled trials RCT , tigecycline was effective in the treatment of complicated skin and soft tissue infections cSSTIs [ 1 β 3 ], complicated intra-abdominal infections cIAIs [ 4 β 7 ] and community-acquired pneumonia CAP [ 8 β 10 ]. Additional studies showed that tigecycline was effective in serious infections caused by known resistant pathogens [ 11 , 12 ].
However, the use of tigecycline in patients with severe underlying diseases is limited, and little is known about its efficacy [ 13 β 15 ]. Few data are available for ICU patients with bacteraemia [ 16 ]. For these reasons, we carried out a prospective, observational study in the intensive care setting to describe tigecycline prescription patterns and outcomes in critically ill patients from French ICUs.
These analyses focused on labelled indications [ 17 β 19 ], global microbiology results [ 20 ] and safety issues [ 21 ], but did not address several key points, such as off-label indications, bacteraemia, emergence of resistance, superinfections and long-term outcomes; this led us to consider this in-depth analysis.
