Roles and Responsibilities of Anti Infective Agents

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Anti-infectives have revolutionized healthcare and are now critical in curing and even helping to prevent many kinds of infection. Thanks to anti-infectives, we can Treat minor infections and most often cure many serious infectious diseases, like pneumonia or tuberculosis Perform routine procedures and complex surgery, such as caesarean sections or joint replacements, which carry a risk of serious infection Give vital immune-suppressive treatments, like chemotherapy, to people with cancer Alarmingly, many anti-invectives are losing their effectiveness due to antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Anti-infective agents are commonly used to treat episodes of “sepsis” in the neonatal intensive care unit. Most infective pulmonary exacerbations later in childhood have a viral etiology—respiratory syncytial virus being an especially virulent agent.145 The use of the monoclonal antibody against RSV (palivizumab) appears to be efficacious in decreasing the severity of RSV in vulnerable infants.313 Antibiotics are indicated only for specific reasons: high index of suspicion of bacterial disease, host defense defect, and cystic fibrosis-like pattern of illness with frequent severe exacerbations. There are no clinical trials to back up these assertions. Complete immunization including influenza during winter periods is vital for infants with CLD.

Parkinson’s disease is a debilitating neurodegenerative disorder whose etiology is still unclear, hampering the development of effective treatments. There is an urgent need to identify the etiology and provide further effective treatments. Recently, accumulating evidence has indicated that infection may play a role in the etiology of Parkinson’s disease. The infective pathogens may act as a trigger for Parkinson’s disease, the most common of which are hepatitis C virus, influenza virus, and Helicobacter pylori. In addition, gut microbiota is increasingly recognized to influence brain function through the gut-brain axis, showing an important role in the pathogenesis of Parkinson’s disease. Furthermore, a series of anti-infective agents exhibit surprising neuroprotective effects via various mechanisms, such as interfering with α-synuclein aggregation, inhibiting neuroinflammation, attenuating oxidative stress, and preventing from cell death, independent of their antimicrobial effects. The pleiotropic agents affect important events in the pathogenesis of Parkinson’s disease. Moreover, most of them are less toxic, clinically safe and have good blood-brain penetrability, making them hopeful candidates for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. However, the use of antibiotics and subsequent gut dysbiosis may also play a role in Parkinson’s disease, making the long-term effects of anti-infective drugs worthy of further consideration and exploration. This review summarizes the current evidence for the association between infective pathogens and Parkinson’s disease and subsequently explores the application prospects of anti-infective drugs in Parkinson’s disease treatment, providing novel insights into the pathogenesis and treatment of Parkinson’s disease. An anti-infective agent may inhibit growth and replication (-static) or cause bacterial cell death (-cidal). A factor that affects whether a drug is bacteriostatic or bactericidal is the concentration at the site of action.19 Antimicrobial agents may be bacteriostatic at low concentrations but bactericidal at high concentrations. These bacteriostatic and bactericidal concentrations have been used to quantitate the activity of an agent against an organism. Approaches to measure this activity have broadly included use of agar based-dilution and broth macrodilution and microdilution systems.20 Agar-based dilution systems lead to measurement of activity as a zone of inhibition.

Regards,

Elsa

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