Microbiological testing of adults hospitalised with community-acquired pneumonia: an international study

Carugati, Manuela; Aliberti, Stefano; Reyes, Luis Felipe; Franco Sadud, Ricardo; Irfan, Muhammad; Prat, Cristina; Soni, Nilam J.; Faverio, Paola; Gori, Andrea; Blasi, Francesco; Restrepo, Marcos I.

Finally, this study has important strengths and limitations. To our knowledge, GLIMP is the first study to enrol a large and diverse group of adult patients hospitalised with CAP across six continents, providing a detailed, real-world picture of CAP diagnostic testing around the world. Our ability to assess the concordance of real-life diagnostic testing with IDSA/ATS and ERS guideline recommendations was affected by the lack of information about recent travel, failure of outpatient antibiotic therapy, presence of cavitary infiltrates, lymphopenia, and feasibility of sputum collection in the GLIMP database. Similarly, incomplete data regarding presence of pleural effusions and clinical and epidemiological determinants of Legionella infection limited the accuracy our findings, probably leading to an inflation of our over-testing estimates. Finally, due to its cross-sectional design, our study did not provide CAP outcome data.