Antibiotics kill the bacteria or make it harder for them to grow. However, some bacteria are no longer affected by these drugs and are termed as “resistant”. Antibiotic resistance is when bacteria have the ability to resist the effects of antibiotics and continue to thrive in spite of treatment. Antibiotic resistance is important because it makes infections that are usually easily treated dangerous and potentially life-threatening. This project seeks to understand if age of patients plays a role in antibiotic resistance. Thus, I tested if rates of antibiotic resistance vary across age groups. My prediction was that there is higher antibiotic resistance with increasing age. I use data from the Surveillance Atlas of Infectious Disease website to test my hypothesis . I examined antimicrobial resistance in Klebiella pneumoniae, a bacterium causing pneumonia in humans, in the year 2015 in Italy. I will look at resistance to three different antibiotics, Carbapenems, Fluoroquinolones, and Aminoglycosides, because these are the three drugs that bacteria have a higher resistance to. I tested for correlation between age of patients and resistant isolates proportions for each antibiotic.
