Antibiotic fails sinus infection test
Medicine doesn’t clear up blocked sinuses any better than placebo, study finds
By Nathan Seppa
Anyone who has felt the pressure of a weeklong sinus infection won’t be happy to hear it, but a study finds that a commonly prescribed medicine doesn’t clear up such attacks any better than the body does on its own.
The findings, in the Feb. 15 Journal of the American Medical Association, don’t apply to people who have chronic sinus infections lasting 28 days or more. But people with trademark signs of an acute sinus infection — yucky drainage, facial pressure, sore teeth, congestion and headache for a full week — overall fared no better with antibiotics than did people getting inert pills, scientists at Washington University in St. Louis report.
“This struck me as a very well-designed, -conducted and -analyzed study,” says James Hughes, an infectious disease physician at Emory University in Atlanta. “It adds to evidence [showing] that in most patients with acute sinus infections, antibiotics don’t add value.”
The researchers randomly assigned 166 adults with sinus infections to get either amoxicillin or a placebo three times a day for 10 days. All patients received other drugs for symptom relief as needed. Three days after treatment started, the two groups had improved at the same pace. Seven days out, slightly more patients getting antibiotics reported improvement, but this edge disappeared by day 10 when about four-fifths of each group reported “significant improvement” in their sinus infections, says study coauthor Jane Garbutt, a physician and researcher at Washington University.