If this is not your name, click here. Other Ophthalmic Surgery Organ Transplantation Orthopaedics Other Osteoarthritis Osteoporosis Otitis Otorhino. Anita Kozyrskyj, B.Sc. Phm., M.Sc., and Michael Moffatt, M.D., M.Sc., of the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, and colleagues analysed 32 randomised, controlled trials of the treatment of AOM in children aged one month to 18 years. The researchers found that among 1,549 children treated for five days with short-acting antibiotics and 1,569 children treated for 10 days, the difference in risk of failure was 7.8 percent favouring longer treatment, when the outcome evaluation was done eight to 19 days after the start of therapy.
Otitis media is inflammation of the middle ear, the cavity between the eardrum and the inner ear.
Symptoms of acute otitis media include severe earache, a feeling of fullness in the ear, deafness, fever and a ringing or buzzing in the ear. Between 65 percent to 95 percent of children experience one or more episodes of AOM before the age of 7. The researchers found that this difference was no longer evident at one month following treatment. In our study, the risk difference at one month following treatment dropped to 2.3 percent, which translates into 44 children requiring treatment with a longer course of antibiotics to prevent one failure following shorter treatment, they write. This is not likely a clinically important difference because the 44th child with persistent symptoms will generally return to a source of health care.