Systemic infection and splenic abscess.

Splenic abscess is a rare complication of systemic infection, sometimes associated with infective endocarditis. Due to its rarity and nonspecific symptoms, diagnosis is difficult. Antibiotic therapy alone is usually unsuccessful, and definitive treatment requires splenectomy, although percutaneous ultrasound-guided drainage has been successful in some patients. Abdominal computed tomography scans and ultrasound evaluation are usually diagnostic. We present two patients with treatment-resistant sepsis who were found at autopsy to have splenic abscess.

Myeloid sarcoma causing airway obstruction.

Myeloid sarcoma is an extramedullary collection of blasts of the myeloid series that partially or totally effaces the architecture of the tissue in which it is found. These tumors have been described in many sites of the body, but the skin, lymph nodes, gastrointestinal tract, bone, soft tissue, and testes are most common. They can arise in a patient following the diagnosis of acute myeloid leukemia, but they may also be precursors of leukemia and should be considered diagnostic for acute myeloid leukemia. The differential diagnosis of this neoplasm includes malignant lymphoma, with which it is often mistaken, leading to diagnostic and therapeutic delays. We present the case of an 84-year-old African American man with a history of renal disease secondary to hypertension and coronary artery disease without any prior history of malignancies who presented with airway obstruction. He was diagnosed with a myeloid sarcoma of the mediastinum compressing his trachea.

Clinical uptake of antimicrobial stewardship recommendations following Nanosphere Verigene Blood Culture Gram-negative reporting.

We performed a retrospective chart review of patients to determine if the Verigene Gram-negative blood culture (BC-GN) results would lead to earlier deescalation of empiric therapy for inpatients with GN bacteremia with Citrobacter spp., Enterobacter spp., Klebsiella spp., and Escherichia coli to appropriate targeted coverage. A total of 899 records were reviewed from April 2014 to February 2016 from three institutions within the Baylor Scott & White Health network. The cases were reviewed for initial antibiotic coverage, timing of Verigene results, change in antibiotic coverage, and how these changes related to the timing of Verigene results. The lab reported the BC-GN results and final conventional susceptibility results within 2.5 ± 1.3 and 73.6 ± 40.0 hours from the Gram stain, respectively. Overall, 29.1% of patients were transitioned from empiric to targeted therapy at 12.2 ± 13.5 hours in response to BC-GN results, which was significantly earlier (P < 0.001) than results by conventional methods. After accounting for patients already on targeted therapy, polymicrobial infections, and patients deceased or lost to follow-up, we identified antibiotic stewardship opportunities in ∼28% of GN infections. Further subanalysis demonstrated site-specific differences in the uptake of stewardship recommendations, whereby 32.4%, 50.5%, and 15.0% of cases at different hospitals demonstrated the expected change in antibiotics. These results suggest that Verigene had the expected impact in a third of the cases and the results reporting algorithm minimized the real-time involvement of the pharmacist while maintaining optimal patient management. However, this impact varied substantially by clinical site and was tempered by variable initial antibiotic coverage and clinician response.