The Angel in the Marble: Antibiotic Duration in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit

Antimicrobial stewardship in the neonatal intensive care unit is a critically important tool to optimize clinical outcomes. The ideal duration of antimicrobial treatment is a key area that contains many knowledge gaps. This narrative review has three aims. One, to highlight the existing evidence for empiric and definitive antibiotic treatment durations for infants; two, to focus on clinical situations where further studies are needed; and three, to propose a rational, goal-based approach to clinical studies that provide for infant safety as shorter treatment durations are investigated.