Acute bronchitis is an acute respiratory disease, the main symptom of which is cough, and the duration, as a rule, does not exceed 3 weeks. For more than 40 years, clinical studies have demonstrated the ineffectiveness of antibiotics in acute bronchitis. Despite this, from 1980 to 1999, the frequency of prescribing antibiotics for acute bronchitis in the United States did not decrease and ranged from 60 to 80%. Over the past 15 years, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has made considerable efforts to reduce the use of antibiotics for a disease that is almost always caused by viruses and has no effect on viruses. Since 2005, there has been a provision that the frequency of prescribing antibiotics for acute bronchitis should be 0%.

Researchers from Boston (Massachusetts, United States) studied from 1996 to 2010 the first visits to family doctors and emergency departments of adult patients aged 18 to 64 with a diagnosis of acute bronchitis. The analysis did not include cases where patients, after consulting a doctor, were hospitalized in hospital, or the treatment was associated with chronic pathology of the bronchopulmonary system, immunodeficiencies, oncology or associated infectious diseases.

A total of 3,153 doctor visits met the criteria for this analysis. The average frequency of prescribing antibiotics for patients diagnosed with acute bronchitis was found to be 71% (95% confidence interval 66-76%), and this indicator not only did not decrease, but even increased over time (the adjusted odds ratio over 10 years is 1.75, 95% CI 1.06-2.9, p = 0.03).

The frequency of administration of macrolides increased from 25% (visits from 1996 to 1998) to 41% (visits to the doctor in 2008-2010), p = 0.01. Other antibiotics were prescribed with a frequency of 35% (95% CI 30-39%).

The limitations of this study were the small sample size, as well as the fact that the study did not take into account visits to physicians who were outside the clinics.

For 15 years, the CDC has forced doctors to stop prescribing antibiotics for acute bronchitis, however, as the results of this study showed, even the efforts of such a large organization in the United States have failed.