Impact of Aminoglycosides-based Antibiotics Combination and Protective Isolation on Outcomes in Critically-ill Neutropenic Patients With Sepsis: A Randomized 2 by 2 Factorial Design Randomized Pragmatic Trial.

Sepsis remains the leading cause of ICU admission in neutropenic patients. This condition remains associated with a high morbidity and mortality, with hospital mortality of 60% when vasopressors are required.

Full protective isolation (including geographic isolation, technical isolation, high-efficiency air filtration, and digestive decontamination) proved to be efficient in patients with profound and prolonged neutropenia with regard to infection rate. However, these studies are biased and were performed up to 40 years ago. More recent studies, performed in patients with less profound neutropenia, or performed without digestive decontamination or with partial protective isolation led however to negative results. More importantly, isolation has been demonstrated to limit access to patients' room and to be associated with suboptimal monitoring, with increased rate of severe and avoidable adverse events. This may explain the uneven use of protective isolation in hematology ward and expert's suggestion to appraise protective isolation benefits using large well conducted RCT.

In neutropenic patients with suspected sepsis, urgent broad antibiotic therapy is mandatory and failure to initiate adequate antibiotic therapy within 1 hour has been associated with a 10 fold increase in adjusted mortality. Current IDSA guidelines recommend using preferentially large anti-pseudomonas beta-lactam therapy. Routine antibiotic combination using aminoglycosides is controversial and not recommended. On one hand, meta-analyses suggested not-only a lack of benefit from this association but also increased rate of renal failure and a trend towards a higher mortality rate with aminoglycosides use. On the other hand, subgroup analysis and low-level evidences studies suggest however a benefit from aminoglycosides in critically-ill patients, patients with severe sepsis, or those with documented gram negative infection. Along this line, both the recent Cochran systematic review and the recent French guidelines focusing on neutropenia management in critically-ill patients advocated additional trials in this field focusing in the sickest patients.

The current study aims to assess benefits of protective isolation and systematic use of aminoglycosides combination antibiotic therapy in critically-ill patients with cancer-related neutropenia and sepsis or septic shock. To do so, the investigators intend to perform a 2x2 factorial design randomized pragmatic trial comparing on one hand benefits of protective isolation (versus no protective isolation) and in the other hand benefits of systematic aminoglycosides antibiotics combination (versus no systematic combination).