Objective To investigate whether de-escalation antibacterial therapy would be helpful to antifungal treatment in patients with invasive pulmonary fungal infection( IPFI) .Methods A prospective study was conducted in 174 IPFI patients( male 106, female 68) in the Second Hospital of Hebei Medical University from January 2008 to July 2010. The clinical data was collected including symptoms, physical signs,microbiological results, treatment and prognosis, etc. The therapeutic results were compared between the patients who received or did not receive de-escalation antibacterial therapy. Results The predominant pathogenic fungus was Candida albicans, which accounted for 59. 7% of IPFI. The effect of antifungal therapy showed statistically significant difference between the patients who received de-escalation antibacterial therapy and the patients who did not ( 60. 0% vs. 34. 5% , P =0. 001) . Conclusion The deescalation use of antibacterial therapy would be helpful to antifungal efficacy.
In recent years, due to the extensive usage of immunosuppressant and the rise of patients with cancers and organ transplantation, the incidence rate of invasive fungal infection, especially invasive pulmonary fungal infection, has increased. Besides the clinical manifestations, medical history and imaging, the diagnosis of pulmonary mycosis mainly depends on pathogen detection methods in clinical microbiology laboratory. However, due to the difficulty in fungi culturing and the low sensitivity of smear microscopy, better molecular biology methods are needed. To date, the emergence of metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS) has improved the identification rate of pulmonary fungal infections. mNGS is significantly superior to traditional detection methods in rapid, accurate, and comprehensive determination of fungi from various clinical specimens, especially atypical fungi. However, some problems in mNGS method have to be addressed including sample collection, report interpretation, and its combination with traditional microbiology methods. With the in-depth discussion and solution of the above problems, mNGS will be indispensable to the etiological diagnosis of pulmonary invasive fungal infection.