• Youngmok Park, Yea Eun Park, Byung Woo Jhun, Jimyung Park, Nakwon Kwak, Kyung-Wook Jo, Jae-Joon Yim, Tae Sun Shim, and Young Ae Kang.
• Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine, Severance Hospital, Yonsei University College of Medicine, Seoul, Republic of Korea.
• Open Forum Infect Dis. 2021 Jun 1; 8 (6): ofab215.

BackgroundCurrent guidelines recommend a susceptibility-based regimen for Mycobacterium abscessus subspecies abscessus pulmonary disease (MAB-PD), but the evidence is weak. We aimed to investigate the association between treatment outcomes and in vitro drug susceptibility to injectable antibiotics in MAB-PD patients.MethodsWe enrolled MAB-PD patients treated with intravenous amikacin and beta-lactams for ≥4 weeks at 4 referral hospitals in Seoul, South Korea. Culture conversion and microbiological cure at 1 year were evaluated based on susceptibility to injectable antibiotics among patients treated with those antibiotics for ≥2 weeks.ResultsA total of 82 patients were analyzed. The mean age was 58.7 years, and 65.9% were women. Sputum culture conversion and microbiological cure were achieved in 52.4% and 41.5% of patients, respectively. Amikacin was the most common agent to which the M. abscessus subspecies abscessus isolates were susceptible (81.7%); 9.8% and 24.0% of the isolates were resistant to cefoxitin and imipenem, respectively. The clarithromycin-inducible resistance (IR) group (n = 65) had a lower microbiological cure rate than the clarithromycin-susceptible group (35.4% vs 64.7%). The treatment outcomes appeared to be similar regardless of in vitro susceptibility results with regard to intravenous amikacin, cefoxitin, imipenem, and moxifloxacin. In the subgroup analysis of the clarithromycin-IR group, the treatment outcomes did not differ according to antibiotic susceptibility.ConclusionsWe did not find evidence supporting the use of susceptibility-based treatment with intravenous amikacin and beta-lactams in patients with MAB-PD. Further research is required.© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Infectious Diseases Society of America.

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