Clinical Research Directory

ESCAPE10: Epidemiology, Risk Factors, and Outcomes of Severe Community-acquired Pneumonia in Elderly PatientsAcquired Pneumonia (sCAP) in Elderly Patients"

The ESCAPE 10 study is a multinational, retrospective, observational cohort study that aims to investigate the epidemiology and outcome determinants of severe community-acquired pneumonia (sCAP) in elderly patients (≥65 years). Conducted across multiple European countries, the study will include at least 500 patients admitted to acute care hospitals with radiologically confirmed sCAP, with enrollment distributed evenly between epidemic (winter) and non-epidemic (summer) seasons. The primary objective is to assess 28-day mortality. Secondary objectives include evaluating in-hospital mortality, pneumonia-related complications, Intensive Care Unit (ICU) stay, ventilation needs, and identifying clinical risk factors associated with poor outcomes. Additionally, the study aims to propose a set of quality indicators for sCAP management and assess gender-related differences and clinical subphenotypes in the post-COVID-19 era. Data will be retrospectively collected from medical records, with no interventions applied. Findings from this study are expected to guide improvements in clinical care, patient safety, and outcome prediction models in elderly populations with sCAP.

Noninvasive Support Methods for Acute Respiratory Failure of Community-acquired Pneumonia

This randomized controlled trial aims to compare the efficacy and safety of high-velocity nasal insufflation (HVNI) versus standard noninvasive ventilation (NIV) in adult patients experiencing acute exacerbations of community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) accompanied by hypoxemic respiratory failure. The primary focus is on assessing treatment failure within 48 hours, defined as the need for intubation or death. Secondary outcomes include evaluations of gas exchange parameters, patient comfort levels, duration of ICU stay, and 28-day mortality rates.

Integrated Clinical Decision Support for Empiric Antibiotic Selection in Sepsis

As antibiotic resistance increases globally, it becomes more difficult to select empiric antibiotic therapy, particularly in patients with sepsis who stand to benefit from early adequate treatment. In particular it is difficult for clinicians to balance antibiotic stewardship principles (the need to avoid unnecessary prescribing of antibiotics that have an excessively broad spectrum of activity that favour resistance development) and under treatment. The integration of multiple risk variables for resistance are hard for clinicians to translate into clinical action, and is seemingly at odds with the natural inclination to provide heuristic/emotion-based antibiotic selection. The inappropriate treatment of sepsis is not uniformly too broad, or too narrow, and there is a need to optimize and tailor selection of antibiotic therapy to each patient, such that those that are at risk for resistant organisms receive broad therapy, and those that are not at risk, receive narrower antibiotic agents. Clinicians need support picking the right antibiotic for each patient, and from this they can potentially drive reduction of unnecessarily broad antibiotic prescribing while preserving adequacy of treatment. Individualized clinical prediction models and decision support interventions are promising approaches that meet these needs by improving the classification of patient risk for antibiotic resistant or susceptible infections in sepsis. Unfortunately, few have been validated in the clinical setting and larger rigorous studies are needed to provide the evidence to support broader clinical adoption. The investigators will perform a cluster randomized cross-over trial of an individualized antibiotic prescribing decision support intervention for providers treating hospitalized patients with suspected sepsis. The aim of this trial is to determine whether a stewardship led clinical decision support intervention can improve antibiotic de-escalation in patients with sepsis while maintaining or improving adequacy of antibiotic coverage. This decision support intervention will be based on a combination of proven decision heuristics (for Gram-positive organisms) and modelled predicted susceptibilities (for Gram-negative organisms) that are individualized to the patient. The primary outcome will be the proportion of patients de-escalated from their initial empiric regimen at 48 hours.

Cohort Study on the Treatment of Severe Pneumonia with Traditional Chinese Medicine

This is a multicenter, prospective cohort study, with syndrome differentiation and treatment of traditional Chinese medicine as the exposure factor. Patients using syndrome differentiation of traditional Chinese medicine combined with conventional treatment of Western medicine are classified as the treatment cohort of Integrated Chinese and Western medicine, and patients using conventional treatment of Western medicine only are classified as the treatment cohort of Western medicine