ASPIRE-ICU: Presenting Preliminary Results at ECCMID 2019

The ASPIRE-ICU study – Advanced understanding of Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa Infections in EuRopE – IntensiveCare Units – kicked off mid-2014. Four years later, after the inclusion of patient 2000 in October 2018, the process of closing sites and data cleaning is in full swing. What’s more, is that preliminary results from ASPIRE-ICU will be presented at ECCMID 2019 by Fleur Paling – the coordinating investigator of the study.

MD Fleur Paling is working as a PhD candidate in infectious disease epidemiology under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Marc Bonten (UMC Utrecht) and Prof. Dr. Jan Kluytmans (UMC Utrecht). She is the coordinating investigator of ASPIRE-ICU and will perform the primary analyses of the study. She talks about her work in the study, from its setup to presenting the preliminary results a few years later.

“I started this position in January 2013, the first months not yet on COMBACTE, but on another large pneumonia study (CAPiTA). In September I was asked to start on WP6A to assess ‘the epidemiology of health-care associated infections’. In practice this meant more or less (apart from analyzing existing databases) starting to set up the ASPIRE studies (ASPIRE-ICU and ASPIRE-SSI). In the following year, more people joined and I was assigned the ICU part of the study, passing on the SSI part to my colleague Darren Troeman.

Due to unforeseen delays in study start-up I decided to take a break from full-time research, and started my GP training in September 2015, while continuing on ASPIRE-ICU for 1 day per week. I returned in September 2018 to finalize the analysis of ASPIRE-ICU, as well as my thesis.”

Fleur will be presenting the preliminary results from ASPIRE-ICU in a Paper Poster (‘Occurrence of Staphylococcus aureus ICU pneumonia in Europe: preliminary results from a COMBACTE consortium study’ – Session: Surveillance of healthcare-associated infections), on Tuesday, 16^th of April, 12:30-13.30, at ECCMID 2019.

“The data shown on the poster at ECCMID is still very preliminary, as the database is not fully locked and clean yet. Furthermore, in the central laboratory sample analysis is still ongoing. We only show descriptive data, which is on the numbers of S. aureus ICU pneumonias that occur, divided per region and per S. aureus colonization status, based on local culture results.

These results are preliminary result on the main outcome of interest of ASPIRE-ICU, and are analyzed in cooperation with the statistical team from the University of Freiburg (Institute of Statistics). Upcoming after this are the multivariate analyses quantifying the independent association of S. aureus colonization status and other factors in relation to S. aureus ICU pneumonia. Finally, a prediction model will be built, that will predict the occurrence of S. aureus ICU pneumonia depending on available risk factors.”

Full results expected in 2019

“Results are anticipated in autumn 2019. In parallel, many other analyses will be performed on ASPIRE-ICU data an thus, output is expected on many other parts as well.”