Patients hospitalized with a serious heart valve infection could finish antibiotics about two weeks earlier when treatment length is matched to how quickly they stabilize, according to results from the POET-II trial presented at the European Society of Cardiology Congress in Munich and published simultaneously in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The trial cut median total antibiotic duration from 41 days to 26, roughly a one-third reduction, and met its prespecified noninferiority criterion for the primary safety outcome. It also produced a finding that has to be reported alongside the headline: relapse of bacteremia or endocarditis occurred more often in the shortened group, 5.1 percent compared with 1.6 percent.
