Merry Raphael, Seyed Hanif Karimzad, Jatin Agarwal, Anirudh Arun Bhandakar, Girish Thunga, Shreedhar N, Vijayanarayana K, Muralidhar Varma and Sureshwar Pandey
Background: Ventilator associated pneumonia (VAP) is a major cause of poor outcome among patients in the intensive care units (ICU) world-wide. OP poisoning patients are very susceptible to respiratory associated problems especially respiratory muscle paralysis. Such patients generally need ventilation support which has high chances of getting VAP. Objective: To find out the Prevalence, causative organisms and treatment pattern of VAP in OP poisoning patients in tertiary care hospital in South India. Methods: A retrospective study was conducted in a tertiary care teaching hospital of South India from 2008 to 2013, total of 500 patients were enrolled for the study and data was collected from the medical records in a suitable designed case record form. Information regarding demographical details, severity assessment, type of pneumonia acquired, causative organisms for VAP, complications, treatment and outcome measures of patients was recorded. Data was entered in SPSS 20.0 and analyzed for the results. Results and Conclusion: The mean age of the Patients admitted was 33.31 ± 14.5 years and majority of them were found to be males (69.4%) and (30.6%) were females. Among the study population, 54 (10.8%) patients acquired VAP. The most common organisms found to have caused pneumonia were gram negative organisms such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa (1.2%), Klebsiella pneumoniae (1.0%) and Acinobacter (0.6%). The most commonly used antibiotics in the treatment of VAP were beta-lactam antibiotics like Cephalosporins (56.1%), Penicillins (31.9%). Respiratory problems are common in OP poisoning patients and hence are very susceptible to VAP. Proper screening and identification of organisms in the early stage with appropriate antibiotics will help in better outcome.
