Help your patients achieve food security with SEARCH

- Kenny Lin, MD, MPH

As screening for social determinants of health in clinical settings "moves from the margins to the mainstream," research has focused on how to efficiently identify and address social needs in practice. An article in the May/June issue of FPM by Drs. David O'Gurek and Carla Henke provided a suite of practical approaches, including tools, workflow, and coding and payment considerations. Dr. Sebastian Tong and colleagues reported the experiences of primary care clinicians screening for social needs in 12 northern Virginia practices in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine. Knowledge of a social need changed care delivery in 23% of patients and improved communication in 53%, but clinicians often felt ill-equipped to help patients with identified needs or connect them to appropriate services.

Help is on the way. The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) recently launched an interactive online tool, the Neighborhood Navigator, to make it easier for family physicians to connect patients with community organizations and social services. This tool complements other resources in the AAFP's EveryONE Project to support patients' health outside of the office that Dr. Jennifer Middleton discussed in a previous Community Blog post.

In the August 1 issue of American Family Physician, Dr. Shivajirao Prakash Patil and colleagues review the problem of food insecurity, defined as "limited availability of nutritionally adequate and safe food or the inability to acquire these foods in socially acceptable ways," which affected an estimated 12% of American households in 2016. According to the authors, food insecurity (FI) has a cyclical relationship with chronic disease, constraining dietary options in ways that increase the risk for development and progression of diseases in children and adults. They recommend that family medicine practices follow the SEARCH mnemonic and utilize food security resources and food assistance programs in appropriate patients:

S (Screen) - "An affirmative response to either of the following statements can identify FI with 97% sensitivity and 83% specificity: (1) Within the past 12 months we worried whether our food would run out before we got money to buy more, and (2) Within the past 12 months the food we bought just didn't last, and we didn't have money to get more."

E (Educate) - "Educate patients at risk of FI about appropriate coping strategies. Although some individuals with limited resources manage without major disruptions to food intake, many eat less or eat less healthy foods to get by."

A (Adjust) - "Adjust the patient's medication if it should be taken with food. Prescribe medications that minimize the likelihood of hypoglycemia for patients with FI who have diabetes."

R (Recognize) - "Recognize that FI is typically recurrent but is usually not chronic."

C (Connect) - "Connect patients with assistance programs and encourage patients with FI to use food banks."

H (Help) - "Help other health care professionals recognize that poor health and FI often exacerbate one another."

Family physicians can also choose to advocate to improve the quality and quantity of food resource programs available in their communities and across the nation.

Top Infectious Disease POEMS of 2017

- Jennifer Middleton, MD, MPH

The current issue of AFP includes the "Top POEMS of 2017 Consistent with the Choosing Wisely Guidelines," an annual round-up of practice-changing studies for family physicians from the last year. 14 POEMs are described in detail (along with 7 more in eTable A). 3 of these practice changers deal with common outpatient infections: oral corticosteroids don't help acute wheezing in adults without asthma, tympanostomy tubes don't improve hearing outcomes in children with recurrent acute otitis media (AOM) or chronic otitis media with effusion (OME), and adding trimethoprim/sulfamethoxale (TMP/SMX) to cephalexin doesn't improve outcomes for adolescents and adults with uncomplicated cellulitis.

The authors of the first study discuss the desirability of avoiding antibiotics for viral lower respiratory tract infections (LRTI), and having an alternative to offer patients may help decrease unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions. Unfortunately, 5 days of prednisolone did not improve the duration or severity of cough or wheezing compared to placebo in this multi-center, randomized controlled trial (RCT) of 401 adults without asthma in the United Kingdom. For now, conservative measures such as rest, fluids, honey (in children over 1 year of age), and antitussives (only in patients older than 6 years) will have to suffice for patients with LRTI as reviewed in this 2010 AFP article on "Diagnosis and Treatment of Acute Bronchitis."

A meta-analysis of 18 RCTs found no difference in hearing after tympanostomy tube placement in children with either recurrent AOM or chronic OME after 12-24 months with age-matched controls. Nearly 7% of US children have had tympanostomy tubes placed, making it the most common ambulatory surgery performed on children in the US at a mean cost of $769 per surgery. That's a lot of parental concern, patient discomfort, and expense for a procedure that's not improving outcomes. This AFP Clinical Evidence Handbook article reminds us that, without antibiotics, AOM symptoms resolve in 80% of children within 3 days. Searching AFP by the keyword "otitis" yields several other useful review articles.

An RCT of 496 patients aged 12 years and older across 5 US emergency departments found no difference in clinical cure rates between patients with uncomplicated cellulitis treated only with cephalexin and patients treated with both cephalexin and TMP/SMX. Dr. Lin discussed this study last year on the blog, reminding us that reducing unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions is an important step to reducing antibiotic resistance. (Patients with a skin abscess requiring incision and drainage, however, may benefit from either oral clindamycin or TMP/SMX.)

Changing established practice habits can be challenging; tools such as office QI projects and pre-visit planning may help, along with using motivational interviewing when patients request inappropriate treatments and using electronic health system reminders. This 2016 AFP editorial reviews "How to Prescribe Fewer Unnecessary Antibiotics: Talking Points that Work With Patients and Their Families." I've added that editorial and the Top POEMS of 2017 article to my AFP Favorites page for quick future reference.

Best practices for preventing gun violence in the clinic and the community

- Kenny Lin, MD, MPH

Family physicians have long recognized that gun violence is a national public health epidemic. In 2015, a coalition of nine medical, public health, and legal organizations, including the American Academy of Family Physicians and the American Bar Association, endorsed several specific recommendations for preventing firearm-related injury and death. These measures included universal criminal background checks for all firearm purchases; educating patients about gun safety and intervening in those at risk of self-harm or harm to others; improving access to mental health care; regulating civilian use of firearms with large capacity magazines; and supporting more research on evidence-based policies to prevent gun violence. A 2014 editorial in AFP also reviewed the role of primary care clinicians in counseling about gun safety based on the best available evidence.

After the February massacre of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida by a 19 year-old former student wielding a legally purchased semiautomatic AR-15-style rifle, the medical editors of AFP felt that we needed to do more to empower clinicians. Surely, when the Founding Fathers endorsed the necessity of a "well-regulated Militia" in the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, they did not envision mentally disturbed teenagers toting weapons with enough firepower to overwhelm entire regiments of Minutemen.

In a special editorial recently published online ahead of print, Dr. Sexton and the AFP medical editors argue that family medicine's emphasis on care of the whole person creates a duty to "confront the epidemic of violence by persons using guns." We review the evidence of the effects of firearm regulations, mental health counseling, and active shooter training on gun safety and violence. Unfortunately, evidence for many interventions remains limited:

A 2018 RAND review of U.S. studies on gun policy published since 2003 concluded that child-access prevention laws (e.g., safe gun storage) reduce self-inflicted and unintentional firearm deaths and nonfatal injuries among youth, and may reduce unintentional firearm injuries among adults. The review also found moderate evidence that laws requiring background checks and prohibiting firearm purchases by individuals with mental illness reduce violent crime and deaths. In contrast, state stand-your-ground laws are associated with increased homicide rates. There was insufficient evidence to determine whether any laws prevent mass shootings. 

Notably, almost two-thirds of the 36,000 firearm-related deaths in the U.S. each year are suicides, leading to our recommendation that "strategies to mitigate firearm suicides should include depression screening and nonjudgmentally asking anyone with depression whether they have a gun in the home." Useful clinical tools include the FIGHTS screening tool for adolescent firearm carrying, the SAD PERSONS suicide risk assessment scale, and the Violence Screening and Assessment of Needs tool for assessing risk of violence in military veterans.

Finally, we encourage family physicians to address the epidemic by making their voices heard in community meetings, online forums, and local publications and communicating with elected state and federal officials to advocate for funding research to study ways to reduce gun violence: "Whether it is speaking up in clinical settings, within our community, or with our elected officials, our voices can make a meaningful difference for our patients, our communities, and our nation."

Minimizing adverse effects from antibiotics: short duration + narrow spectrum

- Jennifer Middleton, MD, MPH

Adverse effects are not uncommon with antibiotics, and two recent POEMs (Patient Oriented Evidence that Matters) in AFP review strategies to minimize them. The first POEM found that shorter courses of antibiotics are equivalent to longer courses for several common outpatient infections. The 2nd POEM found that, for outpatient respiratory tract infections in children, narrow-spectrum antibiotics have a lower risk of adverse effects compared to broad-spectrum antibiotics with equivalent treatment efficacy.

The first POEM is a systematic overview of 9 systematic reviews comparing antibiotic treatment durations for urinary tract infection (UTI), acute pyelonephritis, sinusitis, and community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) in adults, and strep pharyngitis, CAP, UTI, and acute otitis media (AOM) in children. They found that:

AOM (children): 7 or less days =  more than 7 days
CAP (children): 3 days = 5 days
CAP (adults): 7 or less days = more than 7 days
Strep pharyngitis (children): 5-7 days = 10 days
Sinusitis (adults): 3-7 days = 6-10 days
UTI (children): 2-4 days =  7-14 days
UTI (non-pregnant, premenopausal women): 3 days = 5 or more days
UTI (older women): 3-6 days = 7-14 days

The authors found a reduced risk of adverse events for patients treated with shorter durations for AOM, sinusitis, and younger women with UTI; they found no difference among patients with pharyngitis, pyelonephritis, or older women with UTI. Adverse event data was not available for patients treated for CAP or children with UTI.

The 2nd POEM included both a large retrospective cohort arm (over 30,000 children) that reviewed outcomes of children with sinusitis, AOM, or strep pharyngitis diagnoses and a prospective cohort arm (almost 2500 children) examining the same conditions. The findings of the retrospective arm and the prospective arm concurred: broad-spectrum antibiotics (amoxicillin/clavulantate, cephalosporins, macrolides) offered no treatment benefit over narrow-spectrum antibiotics (penicillin, amoxicillin) but did increase the rate of reported adverse effects. The retrospective cohort only reported adverse event rates as documented in the medical record, but the prospective cohort included data gathering of adverse events from parents. The prospective cohort had a much higher rate (10.3 times higher) of adverse effects reported by parents, suggesting that many patients and/or their parents are not reporting these events to physicians.

It's possible that some of the patients who received antibiotics in these studies did not need them at all, thus explaining the lack of benefit in longer antibiotic treatment durations; for example, most cases of acute bacterial sinusitis will resolve without antibiotics (consider offering an intranasal corticosteroid instead), and deferring antibiotics for AOM in children over the age of 2 years with non-severe symptoms is a Choosing Wisely recommendation. Determining which patient needs an antibiotic is not always clear, either; Centor scoring can assist with pharyngitis, but, as Dr. Lin reviewed last week on the blog, procalcitonin levels may not distinguish CAP from lower respiratory tract infections that don't improve with antibiotics (such as bronchitis).

Limiting antibiotic overuse benefits patients and communities. AFP's Choosing Wisely tool facilitates quick review of these recommendations, and there are also AFP By Topics on Pneumonia, Respiratory Tract Infections, and Urinary Tract Infections/Dysuria that include resources on diagnosis and treatment. 

Does procalcitonin make it easier to choose antibiotics wisely for respiratory infections?

- Kenny Lin, MD, MPH

American Family Physician has supported the Choosing Wisely campaign in several ways since it began in 2012, from maintaining a searchable database of primary care-relevant recommendations, to including tables of best practices in clinical review articles, to publishing an occasional editorial containing suggestions of how to implement it into practice. Although Choosing Wisely remains very much a work in progress, staff at the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation recently identified a "Top 12" list of recommendations that are successfully reducing overuse in health systems across the United States. Leading the list is appropriate use of antibiotics for patients with upper respiratory tract infections, a topic that has been previously reviewed in this journal.

A more challenging task for family physicians may be deciding which patients with lower respiratory tract infections need antibiotics - distinguishing acute bronchitis from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease exacerbations or community-acquired pneumonia. Although clinical decision tools exist, their usefulness in outpatient settings is limited. A Cochrane for Clinicians in the July 1 issue reviewed the benefits and harms of procalcitonin-guided antibiotic therapy compared with routine care for acute respiratory infections on mortality, treatment failure, duration of antibiotic exposure, and antibiotic-related adverse effects. In a meta-analysis of 26 randomized, controlled trials (n = 6708), patients receiving procalcitonin-guided therapy had lower 30-day all-cause mortality (NNT=71) across all settings, but no difference in primary care settings. Rates of treatment failure were similar. Total duration of antibiotic exposure was 2.4 days lower in the procalcitonin group, corresponding to a lower percentage of patients in the procalcitonin group experiencing antibiotic-related adverse effects (16.3% vs. 22.1% in the control group).

Should this evidence lead clinicians to adopt procalcitonin-guided therapy algorithms to improve antibiotic stewardship for acute respiratory infections? Limitations of the Cochrane review are worth noting: the studies were relatively small (mean 258 participants); most were in Europe rather than in the U.S.; and most were in emergency department rather than primary care settings. After the review's publication, Dr. D.T. Huang and colleagues reported the results of a large (n=1656) RCT in 14 U.S. hospitals that compared procalcitonin-guided antibiotic therapy with usual care for patients with lower respiratory tract infections in the emergency department and on the inpatient service, if applicable (782 patients were subsequently hospitalized). In contrast to the Cochrane review, the investigators found no significant differences between the groups in duration of antibiotic exposure or adverse outcomes. They concluded that the addition of procalcitonin results did not significantly improve antibiotic decision-making or patient outcomes.

A take-home message from the Cochrane review and the recent U.S. trial is that the effects of procalcitonin measurement on diagnosis and management of acute respiratory infections depend on the clinical setting, patient characteristics, and preexisting adherence of clinicians to high-value care guidelines for antibiotic prescribing. This test may be helpful in certain cases, but probably should not be used routinely.