Seriously ill patients who develop bacterial infections in the bloodstream require aggressive treatment with antibiotics. They also can develop kidney failure that requires hemodialysis.
But the same hemodialysis that removes fluids and toxins from the body can also remove medications, including antibiotics. Thus, proper antibiotic dosing can be difficult, particularly when a relatively new type of dialysis called Sustained Low Efficiency Dialysis (SLED) is used. The procedure is done on patients who cannot tolerate conventional hemodialysis because their blood pressure drops too low during the therapy.
Joanna Q. Hudson, PharmD, FCCP, FASN, associate professor in the Department of Clinical Pharmacy and in the Division of Nephrology at the College of Medicine at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC), has been awarded a $140,000 grant from the Oxnard Foundation of Newport Beach, Calif., to research antibiotic dosing recommendations for patients undergoing SLED. She and co-investigator Elvira Gosmanova, MD, an associate professor of Medicine in the Division of Nephrology at the College of Medicine, will conduct their study titled, “Development of Antibiotic Dosing Recommendations for Sustained Low Efficiency Dialysis,” over a two-year period.
They will measure how quickly and to what extent five antibiotics typically used to treat serious infections are removed or cleared from the body of patients undergoing SLED. This will help them gauge proper antibiotic dosing for this type of patient.
“There is a critical need to determine how this form of dialysis affects drug removal, so that dosing regimens can be designed to maximize the benefits of the antibiotics and minimize the risk of adverse effects,” Dr. Hudson said. “Our ultimate goal is to develop safe and effective antibiotic dosing recommendations for patients undergoing this type of renal replacement therapy who have serious infections.”