Abstract

Background: With the rapid growing of multi-drug resistant organisms (MDROs) and a lack of newly developed antimicrobial agent, tigecycline has been given high hopes and expectations as a candidate to treat all these MDROs except Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Proteus mirabilis.
Methods: All hospitalized adult subjects who received treatment with tigecycline were enrolled at a medical center in Northern Taiwan. Patients treated with tigecycline for 48 hours were excluded.
Results: Almost half patients were shown to have successful clinical response to tigecycline (151/309; 49%), with high clinical success observed in complicated skin and skin structure infections (101/137; 74%). Treatment failure was mostly seen in hospital-acquired pneumonias with MDROs isolates (83/100; 83%). The mortality rate was 27% (84/309), which was mainly due to hospital acquired pneumonias (48/101; 48%).
Conclusion: Our study show good efficacy of tigecycline in the treatment of complicated skin and skin structure infections. Regarding to the treatment of pneumonia, ineffective response was seen as most patients with HAP in our study. Its use in treating other infections not yet approved by the current guidelines requires further research to obtain enough evidence for future approval.