This is a multicenter, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of patients resuscitated from shockable out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.​ Patients were randomized to placebo versus intravenous amoxicillin-clavulanate for two days. The primary endpoint was the incidence of ventilator-associated pneumonia within a week.

The primary endpoint (early ventilator-associated pneumonia) was less common in patients treated with antibiotics.

Antibiotic treatment also reduced the overall incidence of ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) at any timepoint. This suggests that a two-day course of antibiotics didn’t merely temporarily suppress infection (with a rebound effect later on in the patient’s hospital course).

So it’s fair to say that this is a “positive” trial – which is uncommon in critical care research these days.

Given the relatively small size of this trial, antibiotics didn’t affect hard endpoints (such as mortality).

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