Impact of Therapeutic Drug Monitoring on Anti-Infective Agents Amongst Severely Burned Patients Requiring ICU Admission

Sepsis is the major cause of morbidity and mortality amongst burn patients. Burn shock and respiratory failure that used to be the major cause of mortality have progressively been replaced by sepsis and multiple organ failure. It is not rare that treatment failures occurs several weeks, or even months after injury as a consequence of sepsis usually caused by multi-drug resistant (MDR) microorganisms. Introduction of early surgery combined with topical and systemic antibiotherapy dramatically enhanced survival from sepsis after burn trauma, but further improvement is impaired by the rapid development of hard-to-treat MDR bacteria.

Correct prescription of anti-infective agents could be one way to curb the steadily increasing development of multidrug resistance. Administration of antibiotic to burn patient is complex: they frequently suffer from kidney dysfunction, they usually experience tremendous shifts of liquids between intra-vascular - inter-cellular and intra-cellular compartments, they often are hypo-albumin and protein-emic, and finally they present with a profoundly modified metabolism. All those aspects make this particular population of patients at high risk of both under or over prescription.

Monitoring of drug concentrations in the plasma of patients, so-called TDM for Therapeutic Drug Monitoring, has been introduced to clinical practice for several decades primarily to avoid toxicity of a small number of drugs with narrow therapeutic windows. However, with the increasing availability of detection techniques, the number of drugs that can be measured in the plasma of patients has grown tremendously over the last decade. As a consequence, it is currently possible to monitor drug concentrations not only to prevent toxicity, but also to improve efficacy. For instance, several studies demonstrated that TDM improved antibiotic prescription in different populations of hospitalized patients, including critically ill patients, with a direct impact on outcome.

Such studies amongst burn patients are however lacking, although this particular population is at high risk to suffer from mis-prescription. We thus hypothesize that systematic TDM could improve antibiotic prescription in this peculiar population. To this end, we propose to implement a 3-year prospective, randomized, mono-centric, clinical trial that will analyze the impact of systematic TDM on anti-infective agent prescription amongst burned patients.