Among more than 160,000 patients admitted to University of North Carolina hospitals during a recent 5-year period, non-device-associated, or ND, pneumonia was implicated in three of every four nosocomial pneumonia cases, with more than 60% occurring outside the ICU, indicating a possible need to expand infection prevention programs to include non-ventilated patients, researchers said.

The researchers included all hospitalizations of adults aged 18 years or older from January 2013 through December 2017.

During that period, there were 163,386 hospitalizations among 97,485 unique patients.

The researchers detected 771 pneumonia cases, of which 520 were classified as ND pneumonia and 191 as ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP).

Read More