Total hospital admissions for patients with skin and soft tissue infections—of which MRSA is the most prevalent—increased 29% from 2000 to 2004, according to the report titled Trends in U.S. Hospital Admissions for Skin and Soft Tissue Infections. The results appear in the September issue of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

At the same time, community-associated MRSA accounted for 14% of those admissions, becoming a major cause of skin and soft tissue MRSA infections, according to the researchers. The greatest increase in infection admissions were among patients younger than 65 and occurred in urban settings more often than rural centers. “We therefore believe that the clinical and economic effects of CA-MRSA are substantial and growing, and that this increase should be a focus of additional research,” the researchers wrote.

The researchers studied five years of hospital admissions for which skin infections were the principal diagnosis. The data come from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project National Inpatient Sample, which represents discharge data from about 20% of U.S. hospitals.