Vancomycin & Piperacillin/Tazobactam and Acute Kidney Injuries

Megan Luther, PharmD, Advanced Health Services research fellow, Providence Veterans Affairs Medical Center, University of Rhode Island, College of Pharmacy, discusses a meta-analysis that examines the combination therapy of vancomycin and piperacillin/tazobactam causing acute kidney injuries.

Interview Transcript (slightly modified for readability)

“The combination of vancomycin and [piperacillin/tazobactam] is the most common combination therapy that patients receive in the hospital, as far as empiric therapy for antimicrobial coverage before we necessarily know what antibiotics they need to be treated with [and] what that infection actually is.

Recently there have been quite a few studies looking at rates of acute kidney injury with the combination of vancomycin and pip/tazo. We decided to do [a] meta-analysis. [We combined] all of these individual studies that usually [include] a couple of hundred patients into a meta analysis of almost 16,000 patients, to look at what is the actual odds of acute kidney injuries with the combination of vancomycin [and] pip/tazo versus the comparators we chose, vancomycin by itself, pip/tazo alone, and vancomycin with cefepime, or meropenem as another option for empiric therapy.”