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Concept
Antibiotic sensitivity testing
Summary
Antibiotic sensitivity testing or antibiotic susceptibility testing is the measurement of the susceptibility of bacteria to antibiotics. It is used because bacteria may have resistance to some antibiotics. Sensitivity testing results can allow a clinician to change the choice of antibiotics from empiric therapy, which is when an antibiotic is selected based on clinical suspicion about the site of an infection and common causative bacteria, to directed therapy, in which the choice of antibiotic is based on knowledge of the organism and its sensitivities.
Sensitivity testing usually occurs in a medical laboratory, and uses culture methods that expose bacteria to antibiotics, or genetic methods that test to see if bacteria have genes that confer resistance. Culture methods often involve measuring the diameter of areas without bacterial growth, called zones of inhibition, around paper discs containing antibiotics on agar culture dishes that have been evenly inoculated with bacteria. The minimum inhibitory concentration, which is the lowest concentration of the antibiotic that stops the growth of bacteria, can be estimated from the size of the zone of inhibition.
Antibiotic susceptibility testing has been needed since the discovery of the beta-lactam antibiotic penicillin. Initial methods were phenotypic, and involved culture or dilution. The Etest, an antibiotic impregnated strip, has been available since the 1980s, and genetic methods such as polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing have been available since the early 2000s. Research is ongoing into improving current methods by making them faster or more accurate, as well as developing new methods for testing, such as microfluidics.
In clinical medicine, antibiotics are most frequently prescribed on the basis of a person's symptoms and medical guidelines. This method of antibiotic selection is called empiric therapy, and it is based on knowledge about what bacteria cause an infection, and to what antibiotics bacteria may be sensitive or resistant.
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