Trends in Fluoroquinolone use and adverse effects during COVID-19
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Trends in Fluoroquinolone use and adverse effects during the COVID-19 pandemic.
IRAS ID
344485
Contact name
Jack Stanley
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Bristol
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
The COVID-19 pandemic led to changes in patient care involving attempts to manage a greater proportion of patients on an outpatient basis. Fluoroquinolones are a class of broad spectrum antibiotics with the advantage of being available in oral form with good bioavailability, unlikely many other antibiotics with a similar breadth of spectrum. In certain infections, for instance infections with Pseudomonas species, they are the only oral option available. Consequently they are a valuable drug class to avoid hospital admission for such infections, providing benefits for patients and the health system. Over many years there have been concerns about the side effect profile of fluoroquinolones. This led the MHRA to place a warning urging caution over their use in 2019 and a further, more stringent control on their use in 2024.
We hypothesize that the COVID-19 pandemic will have changed prescribing patterns and is an ideal natural experiment to use to explore the association between fluoroquinolone usage and side effects. We seek to determine whether changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in an increased use of fluoroquinolones, or a change in the population to whom fluoroquinolones were prescribed and whether this had any consequent effect on the rate of associated side effects. We aim to compare rates of side effects in the context of fluoroquinolone use to the rate of the same side effects with usage of other antibiotic classes to determine whether there is any true association between fluoroquinolone use and these conditions.
REC name
East of Scotland Research Ethics Service REC 2
REC reference
24/ES/0101
Date of REC Opinion
18 Dec 2024
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion