According to scientists from the UT Southwestern Medical Center, patients suffering from pneumonia can recover more quickly when corticosteroids are added to traditional antimicrobial therapy.

Corticosteroids are primarily used for treating inflammation related to infectious diseases unlike anabolic steroids that are used for bulking up the body muscles.

In a study available online, researchers at UT Southwestern suggested that mice infected with a type of severe bacterial pneumonia and treated with a combination of steroids and antibiotic therapy showed a quicker recovery and faced lesser inflammation in their lungs than mice treated only with antibiotics.

From News-Medical.Net:

“Some people might think that if you give steroids, it would counteract the effect of the antibiotic,” said Dr. Robert Hardy, associate professor of internal medicine and pediatrics and the study’s senior author. “But it turns out you need the antibiotic to kill the bug and the steroid to make the inflammation in the lung from the infection get better. The steroids don’t kill the bugs, but they do help restore health.”

Pneumonia is a lung infection typically characterized by breathing difficulties and spread by coughing and sneezing. Symptoms include headache, fever, chills, coughs, chest pain, sore throat and nausea. Pneumonia caused by the Mycoplasma pneumoniae bacterium is generally a less severe form of the disease that can occur in any age group. It accounts for 20 percent to 30 percent of all community-acquired pneumonia cases.

In the current study, mice infected with the M pneumoniae bacterium were treated daily with a placebo, an antibiotic, a steroid, or a combination of the antibiotic and steroid in order to investigate the effect on M pneumoniae-induced airway inflammation. The animals were then evaluated after one, three and six days of therapy.

“It turns out that the group that got both the antibiotic and the steroids did the best,” Dr. Hardy said. “The inflammation in their lungs got significantly better.”

Dr. Hardy remarked that it is still too early to recommend steroids as a standard treatment for people with this kind of bacterial pneumonia, but he also remarked that the work does support the need for a clinical trial.