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Comparison of Clinical Laboratory Standards Institute and European Committee on Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing guidelines for the interpretation of antibiotic susceptibility at a University teaching hospital in Nairobi, Kenya: a cross-sectional study

Kassim A, Omuse G, Premji Z, Revathi G

Annals of clinical microbiology and antimicrobials, 2016

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The Clinical Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) and the European Committee on Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing (EUCAST) guidelines are the most popular breakpoint guidelines used in antimicrobial susceptibility testing worldwide. The EUCAST guidelines are freely available to users while CLSI is available for non-members as a package of three documents for US $500 annually. This is prohibitive for clinical microbiology laboratories in resource poor settings. We set out to compare antibiotic susceptibility determined by the two guidelines to determine whether adoption of EUCAST guidelines would significantly affect our susceptibility patterns.

METHODS: We reviewed minimum inhibitory concentrations (MIC) of various antibiotics routinely reported for Escherichia coli (E. coli), Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) and Pseudomonas aeruginosa (P. aeruginosa) isolates from an automated microbiology identification system (VITEK-2) at the Aga Khan University Hospital Nairobi's Pathology department. These MICs were then analyzed using both CLSI 2015 and EUCAST 2015 guidelines and classified as resistant, intermediate or susceptible. We compared the susceptibility and agreement between the CLSI and EUCAST categorizations.

RESULTS: Susceptibility data from a total of 5165 E. coli, 1103 S. aureus and 532 P. aeruginosa isolates were included. The concordance rates of the two guidelines for E. coli, S. aureus and P. aeruginosa ranged from 78.2 to 100 %, 94.6 to 100 % and…

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Evidence Hub reads this as a cross-sectional, done in people. Its evidence level is 4 of 5 (Low · observational). Observational designs can show an association but not prove cause.

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