Comparison of the incidence of vancomycin-associated nephrotoxicity following the change from trough-guided dosing to AUC-guided doing using trough-only data.

OBJECTIVES: Although use of AUC-guided vancomycin dosing was recommended in the revised 2020 consensus guideline, collection of multiple vancomycin serum samples to calculate AUC may cause clinical complications. AUC calculated from trough-only data (one-point AUC-guided dosing) has not been sufficiently validated. The aim of the present study was to compare the incidence of nephrotoxicity following the change from trough-guided to one-point AUC-guided dosing.

METHODS: We conducted a single-centre, prospective cohort study to compare the incidence of nephrotoxicity between a trough-guided dosing group and one-point AUC-guided dosing group.

RESULTS: One-point AUC-guided dosing significantly decreased the incidence of acute kidney injury (AKI) compared with trough-guided dosing (2.8% versus 17.4%, P = 0.002). Further, Kaplan-Meier plots for cumulative incidence of the AKI-free rate indicated that the onset of AKI was significantly longer in the one-point AUC-guided dosing group than in trough-guided dosing (HR, 6.5; 95% CI, 1.5-27.4; P = 0.011). Moreover, multivariate Cox proportional hazard analysis indicated that implementation of one-point AUC-guided dosing was a significant protective factor against the incidence of AKI (age-adjusted HR, 0.164; 95% CI, 0.04-0.69; P = 0.014).

CONCLUSIONS: Compared with trough concentration-guided dosing, AUC-guided dosing using one-point sampling markedly reduced the incidence of AKI, without additional serum sampling.