Antibiotics Often Used Inappropriately for Catheter-Associated Bacteriuria

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Clinicians often don't know how to manage catheter-associated asymptomatic bacteriuria, so they overtreat it with antibiotics, a new survey suggests.

"We found that health care providers' cognitive biases, or mental shortcuts, are set incorrectly," said principal investigator Dr. Barbara W. Trautner of the Michael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center and Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.

"Certain cues ingrained during medical training, such as elevated white blood cells in the urine being diagnostic of urinary tract infection (UTI) in young women, are being applied incorrectly to patients with urinary catheters. These incorrect mental shortcuts lead to over-diagnosis of UTI in hospitalized patients with urinary catheters," she told Reuters Health by email.

>LEARN MORE about education and better methods to avoid overtreatment from medscape.com