Recent Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidance endorses the use of an early clinical response endpoint as the primary outcome for community-acquired bacterial pneumonia (CABP) trials. While antibiotics will now be approved for CABP, in practice they will primarily be used to treat patients with community-acquired pneumonia (CAP). More importantly, it is unclear how achievement of the new FDA CABP early response endpoint translates into clinically applicable real-world outcomes for patients with CAP. To address this, a retrospective cohort study was conducted among adult patients who received ceftriaxone and azithromycin for CAP of Pneumonia Outcomes Research Team (PORT) risk class III and IV at an academic medical center. The clinical response was defined as clinical stability for 24 h with improvement in at least one pneumonia symptom and with no symptom worsening. A classification and regression tree (CART) was used to determine the delay in response time, measured in days, associated with the greatest risk of a prolonged hospital length of stay (LOS) and adverse outcomes (in-hospital mortality or 30-day CAP-related readmission). A total of 250 patients were included. On average, patients were discharged 2 days following the achievement of a clinical response. In the CART analysis, adverse clinical outcomes were higher among day 5 nonresponders than those who responded by day 5 (22.4% versus 6.9%, P = 0.001). The findings from this study indicate that time to clinical response, as defined by the recent FDA guidance, is a reasonable prognostic indicator of real-world effectiveness outcomes among hospitalized PORT risk class III and IV patients with CAP who received ceftriaxone and azithromycin.
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