Review of recent clinical trials of hospital-acquired pneumonia and ventilator-associated pneumonia: a perspective from academia.

Clinical trials evaluating antimicrobial therapy for nosocomial pneumonia face many hurdles in terms of producing data that are widely applicable, supportive of safe medical practices, and able to demonstrate distinct advantages of one form of therapy over the other. Adherence to strict performance measures in conducting such trials should improve their overall quality. Such measures include enrollment of clearly defined patient populations who have a high likelihood of nosocomial pneumonia, use of diagnostic measures to confirm the presence of lower respiratory tract infection, and inclusion of broad-based pathogen distributions to ensure that the trial is applicable to the majority of patients developing nosocomial pneumonia.