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Friday, 09/14/2012
Adamantia Liapikou successfully defended her doctoral thesis: “Impact of guidelines of stratification of community and hospital acquired pneumonia severity and treatment”
The public event was held last July 13th in the University of Barcelona, Faculty of Medicine
Adamantia Liapikou is Consultant in Respiratory Medicine at the Sotiria Chest Diseases Hospital (Athens, Greece). Between July 2007 and July 2008 she collaborated with our Applied Research in Respiratory diseases group in IDIBAPS of Barcelona. The collaboration continued even after she travelled back to Greece, and now she successfully defended her doctoral thesis. Results were published on the high impact factor journal Clinical Infectious Diseases (CID), including an editorial. The thesis, entitled “Impact of guidelines of stratification of community and hospital acquired pneumonia severity and treatment” was directed by Prof. Antoni Torres. The public event took place on July 13th in the University of Barcelona, Faculty of Medicine, and the thesis tribunal comprised Dr. Alex Soriano, Dr. Jordi Almirall and Dr. Antoni Artigas.
The first study published in CID is an attempt to validate the predictive rule suggested by the Infectious Diseases Society of America/American Thoracic Society (IDSA/ATS CAP) guidelines for the identification of patients with severe CAP and the selection of those individuals who require ICU admission. The authors prospectively observed consecutive patients with CAP who met predefined criteria. According to the results, the predictive rule to identify severe CAP is accurate for ICU admission and improved the prediction of mortality, compared with the previous American Thoracic Society guidelines. The need for ICU management was clear when either of the major criteria were employed but the need for ICU care when only the minor criteria were used was not unequivocally supported by the results.
The second article appeared short after in CID, and studied the impact of the American Thoracic Society-Infectious Diseases Society of America guidelines for hospital-acquired pneumonia in the intensive care unit. With 276 observed patients, the work concluded that the 2005 guidelines predict potentially drug-resistant microorganisms worse than the 1996 guidelines. On the other hand, adherence to guidelines resulted in more adequate treatment and a trend to a better clinical response in the group of patients with late onset or risk factors for potentially drug-resistant microorganisms (238 patients), but it did not influence the length of stay or mortality rates.
Dr. Adamantia Liapikou brilliantly defended her doctoral thesis and obtained the best qualification, Excellent Cum Laude. The thesis' tribunal discussed with interest the results presented by the PhD Researcher, and acknowledged the leadership of the thesis director Prof. Antoni Torres.