Antibiotic resistance is a global challenge to public health. The increase in resistance could lead to a reduced life expectancy and daily quality of life. The role of primary care physician is very important as they write most of the prescriptions.
Some studies showed that women have more antibiotics prescribed to them. However, overall, the influence of gender on antibiotic prescription is not well studied to date. We will carry out a prospective longitudinal study using antibiotic prescription data collected within Sentinella, the Swiss sentinel practices network, between 2017 and 2022. We intend to describe differences by patient sex/gender in antibiotic prescription in Switzerland in the primary care setting.
We will analyze the prescriptions overall and by indication, and we will study associations with age group and region. We will also explore differences according to gender of the physician. We hypothesize that antibiotic prescription to women and men differ. For some indications such as urinary tract infection, a biological sex factor is plausible, but in other indications such as respiratory infections, this is less obvious and gender bias can be suspected.
Our work could support recommendations as part of the national strategy to decrease the antibiotics prescriptions by primary care physician, thus helping reduce the increasing risk of antibiotic resistance.
