Nursing home-acquired pneumonia. Treatment options.

Nursing home-acquired pneumonia (NHAP) is a diagnostic and therapeutic challenge, and antimicrobial therapy represents only 1 facet of the treatment of this disease. The nursing home population consists of a mixture of well, frail and dependent elderly. For some residents, supportive care may be the best therapeutic option. A variety of antimicrobial regimens have been proposed for the empirical therapy of NHAP; however, there are still very few data from controlled clinical trials that assess outcome. The clinical trials that have been completed support the concept that an early switch from intravenous to oral therapy can be successfully used to treat pneumonia affecting frail, often seriously ill, groups of patients. Annual influenza vaccine should be offered to all nursing home residents. This practice is about 50% effective in preventing hospitalisation and pneumonia, and about 80% effective in preventing death. The same level of evidence is not available to support the use of pneumococcal vaccine in this group; however, current practice suggests that all nursing home residents receive this vaccine on admission and once every 6 years thereafter. Frequently, knowledge about pneumonia is not applied as optimally as should be done. Care maps have been shown to reduce length of stay and shorten the time from emergency room entry until administration of antibiotic therapy by up to 3 hours. Areas for urgent research attention in patients with NHAP are: (a) proper studies to define the microbiological aetiology of NHAP (this requires bronchoscopy with sampling of the distal airways using a protected bronchial brush); (b) randomised controlled clinical trials of sufficient size to determine whether one antibiotic regimen is superior to another (currently most trials are designed to show that the agent under study is equivalent to a currently used agent); and (c) end-of-life decision making in the nursing home population.