The Ideal Amount of Time to Treat Persons with Community-Acquired Pneumonia with Antibiotics: A Comprehensive Systematic Review

Abstract

Background: This study aims to provide the ideal amount of time to treat persons with community acquired pneumonia with antibiotics. Methods: Following PRISMA 2020 guidelines, this systematic review focused exclusively on full-text articles published in English between 2014 and 2024. Result: The study conducted a comprehensive review of over 100 publications sourced from reputable databases, including ScienceDirect, SagePub, and PubMed. Following an initial screening, five publications were identified as warranting more in-depth analysis. Consequently, a thorough review of these selected studies was performed to ensure a detailed and rigorous evaluation. Conclusion: If clinical stability is attained, a shorter treatment duration of 3–5 days likely presents the best compromise between treatment burden and efficacy for treating CAP in adults. The certainty of the results could be jeopardized, nevertheless, due to the small number of included studies and the general moderate-to-high risk of bias. It is necessary to conduct more research on the shorter length range.