This is a noninferiority randomized clinical trial out of Spain that showed 5 days of antibiotics for community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) were enough and validated the IDSA/ATS guidelines for CAP in terms of duration of therapy.

The findings themselves are enough for a link, but really I want to draw attention to this study because of this quote in their “Discussion”:

Determining the duration of antibiotic treatment based on clinical response appears to be a better strategy than using arbitrary treatment lengths.

True and ballsy.

For those who don’t know, most of the recommended durations of antibiotic treatment have never been studied. They are based on our best guesses. I suspect that if we did studies like this one we would find that we could safely treat for shorter durations. This will be an intense area of research for antimicrobial stewardship if anybody will fund it.