Objectives: To determine whether contemporary β-lactam anti-infective dosing recommendations in critically ill children achieve concentrations associated with maximal anti-infective activity. The secondary objective was to describe the microbiological and clinical outcomes associated with β-lactam therapeutic drug management.
Design: Electronic Medical Record Review.
Setting: A 189-bed, freestanding children's tertiary care teaching hospital in Philadelphia, PA.
Patients: Patients admitted to the PICU from September 1, 2014, to May 31, 2017, with sepsis and those receiving extracorporal therapy with either extracorporeal membrane oxygenation or continuous renal replacement therapy that had routine β-lactam therapeutic drug management.
Interventions: None.
Measurements and main results: Eighty-two patients were in the total cohort and 23 patients in the infected cohort accounting for 248 samples for therapeutic drug management analysis. The median age was 1 year (range, 4 d to 18 yr) with a mean weight of 19.7 ± 22.3 kg (range, 2.7-116 kg). Twenty-three patients (28%) had growth of an identified pathogen from a normally sterile site. Seventy-eight of 82 patients (95%) had subtherapeutic anti-infective concentrations and did not attain the primary pharmacodynamic endpoint. All patients in the infected cohort achieved a microbiological response, and 22 of 23 (95.7%) had a positive clinical response.
Conclusions: Overall, 95% of patients had subtherapeutic anti-infective concentrations and did not achieve the requisite pharmacodynamic exposure with current pediatric dosing recommendations. All patients achieved a microbiological response, and 95.7% achieved clinical response with active β-lactam therapeutic drug management. These data suggest β-lactam therapeutic drug management is a potentially valuable intervention to optimize anti-infective pharmacokinetics and the pharmacodynamic exposure. Further, these data also suggest the need for additional research in specific pediatric populations and assessing clinical outcomes associated with β-lactam therapeutic drug management in a larger cohort of pediatric patients.