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The American Heart Association (AHA) has revised its guidelines, last published 10 years ago, on prescribing prophylactic antibiotics (PAs) for prevention of endocarditis. Now, committee members have completed a new meta-analysis of the current literature to evaluate the usefulness of PAs, with a primary focus on dental procedures.
They concluded that because transient bacteremia frequently occurs during routine daily activities — such as tooth brushing, flossing, and eating — dental procedures are just one of many thousands of an individual’s annual bacterial exposures, and PAs probably prevent only a tiny percentage of potential endocarditis infections. The cumulative exposure to bacteremia from routine daily activities during 1 year is es…