A clinical trial conducted in 9 Catalan primary health care centers, led by Dr. Marc Miravitlles, researcher of the Pneumology group at Vall d’Hebron Institute of Research (VHIR), and Dr. Carl Llor, researcher from the Jaume I primary health care center in Tarragona and from the Universidad Rovira i Virgili, has demonstrated the inefficacy of antibiotics in patients with non-complicated acute bronchitis. The study, published in the British Medical Journal, has also found no significant differences in the number of days with cough between patients treated with anti-inflammatories. The clinical trial was carried out from 2010 to 2012 in 416 patients aged between 18 and 70 without associated respiratory comorbidities and with symptoms associated with respiratory tract infection. All of them had cough as the predominant symptom and discoloured sputum and at least one other symptom of lower respiratory tract infection such as dyspnea, wheezing, chest discomfort, or chest pain.Randomly and with their consent, patients received one of three treatment arms: the antibiotic ‘amoxicillin-clavulanic acid 500mg/125mg’, the anti-inflammatory ‘Ibuprofen 600mg’ and placebo. Each drug was administered three times daily for 10 days. 390 of the total number of patients returned their symptom diaries fully completed. Specifically, the median number of days with frequent cough was slightly lower among patients assigned to anti-inflammatory (from 8 to 10 days) compared with those receiving antibiotics (from 10 to 12 days) or placebo (from 8 to 14 days). With these results, Dr. Miravitlles alerts that “there is an over-prescription of antibiotics in patients with non-complicated acute bronchitis, that doesn’t reports benefits but increases the levels of antibiotics resistance”. On the other hand, the case of the anti-inflammatory is different because they don’t cause the same damage than antibiotics. “There was a slightly reduction of cough duration among patients treated with Ibupofren, which was not significant”, reports the researcher. Nonetheless, he doesn’t reject that anti-inflammatories might improve the evolution of patients with more symptoms.