Study - Doctors don't follow infection guides

CHICAGO -- Doctors may be inflating the costs of treating urinary tract infections by ignoring treatment guidelines, according to a new study.

The study, published in today's Archives of Internal Medicine, suggests that doctors are driven by drug company promotions to use newer, more expensive drugs.

"If every drug can work and one drug is promoted more heavily, doctors tend to prescribe the one they've heard more about," said co-author Dr. Elbert Huang, of the University of Chicago.

Researchers from the University of Chicago and Stanford University studied 1,478 cases of patients with urinary tract infections nationwide from 1989 to 1998.

They found that only 24 percent of the patients' prescriptions were written for antibiotics recommended by the Infectious Disease Society of America, down from 48 percent a decade earlier.

Huang said some of the drugs being prescribed are many times more expensive than the recommended medications.

He also said there also is a concern that having several classes of antibiotics in use at the same time might cause infections to become resistant to all those classes at once.