Should prophylactic antibiotics be used in afebrile neutropenic oncology patients?
Walter T Hughes
Correspondence Department of Infectious Diseases, St Jude Children's Research Hospital, 332 N Lauderdale St, Memphis, TN 38105-2794, USA
Email walter.hughes@stjude.org
This article has no abstract so we have provided the first paragraph of the full text.
Three to four decades ago, episodes of fever during profound neutropenia in cancer patients were associated with mortality rates of 25–30%.1 Oncologists and specialists in infectious diseases developed approaches to manage this entity, including immediate hospitalization and empirical intravenous administration of high-dose broad-spectrum antibiotics. This approach still prevails, in an updated form.
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