Doctors are often reluctant to prescribe antibiotics for people with chronic sinus infections because bacteria can develop resistance to the antibiotics. Researchers in Boston looked for resistant bacteria in those patients.

What the researchers wanted to know: As individual patients are given antibiotics for their chronic sinus infections, do they become more likely to harbor antibiotic-resistant bacteria?

What they did: Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston keeps an electronic database on the results of sinus cultures, including whether each patient's sinuses were home to any antibiotic-resistant microbes. The researchers went through that database and pulled out information on the 90 patients who had more than one entry, so they could look at how bacterial populations changed over time.

What they found: Patients did not tend to have more resistant bacterial populations over time. If anything, their bacteria may have become less resistant to antibiotics.

What the study means to you: The researchers say people with serious chronic sinus infections (or chronic rhinosinusitis as it is more accurately called) should be treated very carefully, with antibiotics targeted at the specific bacteria living in their sinuses.

Caveats: All of these patients were treated at Brigham and Women's Hospital, an academic hospital with an excellent reputation, where physicians may be particularly aware of the best ways to treat chronic sinus infections. Also, the researchers didn't say what antibiotics the patients in the database had taken.

Find out more: All about sinusitis, from the National Library of Medicine

Teensy fungus in the air may cause chronic rhinosinusitis

Read the article: Bhattacharyya, N. and L.J. Kepnes. "The Risk of Development of Antimicrobial Resistance in Individual Patients with Chronic Rhinosinusitis." Archives of Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery. October 2004, Vol. 130, pp. 1201-1204.

Abstract online: http://archotol.ama-assn.org