Potent steroid may help prevent meningitis deaths

A potent steroid drug given to fight inflammation might help reduce a person’s risk of dying from bacterial meningitis, Dutch researchers said on Wednesday.

When given right away, the intravenous treatment, called dexamethasone, helped prevent deaths and hearing loss, the team reported in the journal Neurology.

“Using this treatment in people infected with meningitis has been under debate because in a few large studies it was shown to be ineffective,” Dr. Diederik van de Beek of the University of Amsterdam said in a statement.

“Our results provide valuable evidence suggesting that dexamethasone is effective in adult cases of bacterial meningitis and should continue to be used.”

Bacterial meningitis can cause seizures, brain damage, hearing and memory loss and death in otherwise healthy people in less than 48 hours. It has about a 15 percent fatality rate if treated with antibiotics.

The team studied 357 Dutch people age 16 or older with pneumococcal meningitis, the most severe form of bacterial meningitis, between 2006 and 2009.

Of those, 84 percent were given dexamethasone through an IV with or before the first dose of antibiotics.

Researchers compared that with an earlier study of 352 people treated for bacterial meningitis from 1998 through 2002, before patients were given dexamethasone, which is sold generically.

In that study, just 3 percent got the drug.

They found the rate of death for was 10 percent lower in people who got the steroid drug compared with the earlier study. Rates of hearing loss were also about 10 percent lower.

Characterized by fever, headache and stiff neck, bacterial meningitis is a relatively rare disease that involves the inflammation of membranes covering the brain and spinal cord. It is a more serious infection than viral meningitis.

SOURCE: Neurology, online September 29, 2010.