Two classes of commonly prescribed oral antibiotics are associated with the greatest risk for severe drug rashes that can lead to emergency department visits, hospitalizations and even death, according to a new study. Researchers from ICES, Sunnybrook Research Institute and the Department of Medicine at the University of Toronto's Temerty Faculty of Medicine suggest that prescribers should consider using lower-risk antibiotics for their patients when clinically appropriate. Serious cutaneous adverse drug reactions (cADRs), or severe drug rash, are a group of rare but potentially life-threatening delayed reactions involving the skin and, often, internal organs.
Some of these reactions carry mortality rates from 20 to 40%. While many different classes of drugs can cause serious cADRs, antibiotics are among the most commonly reported triggers for these reactions. Clinicians have speculated that certain antibiotics carry greater risk for these severe reactions, but no study has ever confirmed these claims.
Our objective was to explore the risk for cARDs in a population of older adults, who tend to receive disproportionately more antibiotic prescriptions than younger adults." Erika Lee, allergist and trainee with ICES and Temerty Medicine's Eliot Phillipson Clinician-Scientist Training Program Published in the journal JAMA , this case-control study used healthcare data from ICES of adults 66 years or older who received a prescription for at least one oral antibiotic between 2002 a.