Gerber’s team has been phoning families across Philadelphia. “We are trying to get an equal number of children who received narrow-spectrum antibiotics and broad-spectrum antibiotics across each of the three conditions,” he says. To find families interested in participating in the study, he says, “we call and call and call.”
The team has interviewed more than 3,000 parents of children who had received antibiotic prescriptions for respiratory infections. Five and 14 days after a child’s office visit, researchers are phoning parents to find out how the child is doing. The interviewers ask about symptoms and side effects such as hives or diarrhea, whether the family needed to return to the doctor for a different prescription, and whether children and parents were getting enough sleep and were back on normal daytime schedules. The team will correlate the families’ responses with the type of antibiotic prescribed.
The researchers hypothesize that children who receive the broad-spectrum drugs will do no better than those who receive the narrower ones. “Potentially, some adverse effects such as diarrhea might be worse with the newer antibiotics,” Gerber says.
Of course, the results may instead show that for certain infections, broad-spectrum drugs work better, or that kids receiving one type of drug may experience more hives but also miss less school.
“The phone calls get us that rich, patient-centered information that you can’t get from electronic health records,” Gerber observes. Nuances in the study’s results should allow doctors and parents to make more-personalized treatment decisions based on the medical findings and what’s most important to the family.
“We hope to get clear-enough data to help inform practice moving forward,” Gerber says.