Predictors of Failure of Empiric Outpatient Antibiotic Therapy in Emergency Department Patients With Uncomplicated Cellulitis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Despite several expert panel recommendations and cellulitis treatment guidelines, there are currently no clinical decision rules to assist clinicians in deciding which emergency department (ED) patients should be treated with oral antibiotics and which patients require intravenous (IV) therapy at first presentation of cellulitis amenable to outpatient treatment. OBJECTIVES: The objective was to determine risk factors associated with adult patients presenting to the ED with cellulitis who fail initial antibiotic therapy as outpatients and require a change of antibiotics or admission to hospital. METHODS: This was a prospective cohort study of patients 18 years of age or older presenting with cellulitis to one of two tertiary care EDs (combined annual census 140,000). Patients were excluded if they had been treated with antibiotics for the cellulitis before presenting to the ED, if they were admitted to the hospital, or if they had an abscess only. Trained research personnel administered a questionnaire at the initial ED visit with telephone follow-up 2 weeks later. Multivariable logistic regression models determined predictor variables independently associated with treatment failure (failed initial antibiotic therapy and required a change of antibiotics or admission to hospital). RESULTS: A total of 598 patients were enrolled, 52 were excluded, and 49 were lost to follow-up. The mean (±standard deviation [SD]) age was 53.1 (±18.4) years and 56.4% were male. A total of 185 patients (37.2%) were given oral antibiotics, 231 (46.5%) were given IV antibiotics, and 81 patients (16.3%) received both oral and IV antibiotics in the ED. A total of 102 (20.5%, 95% confidence [CI] = 17.2% to 24.2%) patients had treatment failures. Fever (temperature > 38°C) at triage (odds ratio [OR] = 4.3, 95% CI = 1.6 to 11.7), chronic leg ulcers (OR = 2.5, 95% CI = 1.1 to 5.2), chronic edema or lymphedema (OR = 2.5, 95% CI = 1.5 to 4.2), prior cellulitis in the same area (OR = 2.1, 95% CI = 1.3 to 3.5), and cellulitis at a wound site (OR = 1.9, 95% CI = 1.2 to 3.0) were independently associated with treatment failure. CONCLUSIONS: These risk factors should be considered when initiating empiric antibiotic therapy for ED patients with cellulitis amenable to outpatient treatment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".