Researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis have found that taking antibiotics for sinus infections has little effect on the length of time it takes patients to get better, and does little to alleviate the symptoms of the infection. In the study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, antibiotics fared no better than a placebo. The researchers recommend that patients skip the antibiotics, and instead take medications to alleviate symptoms such as congestion, cough, fever, and headache.

Doctors may be overprescribing antibiotics to patients, with as many as 1 in 5 antibiotic prescriptions given for sinus infections. If the antibiotics aren't helping, why use them? Experts are especially concerned that overuse of antibiotics is leading to the rise of drug-resistant bacteria.

In the study, patients complaining of sinus infections were given a 10-day prescription of either a placebo or amoxicillin, a commonly-used antibiotic. All patients were given non-antibiotic medications to alleviate congestion, cough, fever, headache, and other symptoms. All of the patients were assessed after 3, 7, 10, and 28 days.

At the 3-day mark, there was no difference between the responses of the patients on the placebo and on the antibiotics. On the 7th-day assessment, there was a very slight improvement in the patients on antibiotics in comparison to the placebo, but the difference was so minor as to be undetectable to most patients. By the 7th day, most patients already reported that most of their symptoms were much improved or cured. Researchers believed that the tiny (and late) improvement of patients on antibiotics was not significant enough to warrant the use of antibiotics.

There was no difference between the two groups in the amount of medications patients used to relieve pain, fever, congestion, and cough.

The study excluded those suffering from chronic sinus infections, as well as patients with additional complications such as ear and chest infections.

Given that there is little or no appreciable difference between being treated with antibiotics or not when it comes to a sinus infection, researchers recommend that patients take medications to relieve their symptoms and wait for the infection to go away on its own. This may help public efforts to reduce unnecessary use of antibiotics, and thus reduce the rate at which drug-resistant bacteria are developing.