Tel Aviv, Israel—With a short course of adjuvant dexamethasone, children with septic arthritis showed show earlier improvement in clinical and laboratory parameters than those treated with antibiotics alone, according to an Israeli study published in the journal Pediatrics. With prospective studies of children with septic arthritis finding that the addition of dexamethasone to antibiotic therapy contributed significantly to clinical and laboratory improvement, study authors from Schneider Children’s Medical Center of Israel in Petach Tikva and Tel Aviv University sought to evaluate the effect of the regimen outside of a randomized controlled trial. In their study from 2008 to 2013 with a cohort of 116 patients—90 treated with antibiotics alone and 26 treated with antibiotics+dexamethasone—patients receiving the combination had shorter duration of fever, more rapid clinical improvement, more rapid decrease in C-reactive protein levels, shorter duration of parenteral antibiotic treatment, and shorter hospital stays. Recurrent fever and joint pain occurred in four patients receiving the antibiotics-dexamethasone combination after completion of the steroid course, however.