One week of antibiotics after surgery for bone infection was as good as four

The edition in brief

In SOLARIO, 500 adults who had surgery for orthopaedic infection with an implanted local-antibiotic carrier were randomised to at least four weeks or at most seven days of systemic antibiotics. Treatment failure at 12 months was 11.1% with the short course and 14.1% with the long (difference −3.0 points, 95% CI −9.0 to 3.0), meeting non-inferiority, and treatment-related symptoms fell from 45% to 17%. ROAM/EORTC-1308 randomised 157 patients after complete resection of a WHO grade 2 atypical meningioma to 60 Gy radiotherapy or observation; recurrence was 14% vs 30% and 5-year disease-free survival 80% vs 64% (HR 0.51), with 8% serious radiation-related adverse events. TARGET-CTCA found that routine outpatient CT coronary angiography after MI had been ruled out in the emergency department did not reduce MI or cardiac death over three years (7.1% vs 7.3%). CREST-2 found that stenting or endarterectomy for severe asymptomatic carotid stenosis did not improve cognition at four years compared with intensive medical therapy. And ORBEX found that the bacterial lysate OM-85, given to high-risk infants for two years, did not prevent wheezing illness in the following three.