AI Summary
Hospital staff work to prevent patients from acquiring infections while in the hospital, but infections still occur. A study suggests that the main cause of the bacterium Clostridioides difficile (C. diff) infections may be the characteristics of the patients themselves rather than hospital transmission. The study analyzed fecal samples from ICU patients and found that over 9% were colonized with C. diff. Genome sequencing of C. diff strains showed limited spread between patients.
Hospital staff spend a significant amount of time working to protect patients from acquiring infections while they are being cared for in the hospital.
They employ various methods from hand hygiene to isolation rooms to rigorous environmental sanitation. Despite these efforts, hospital-onset infections still occur-;the most common of which is caused by the bacterium Clostridioides difficile, or C. diff, the culprit of almost half a million infections in the U.S. each year.
Surprising findings from a new study in Nature Medicine suggest that the burden of C. diff infection may be less a matter of hospital transmission and more a result of characteristics associated with the patients themselves.
The study team, led by Evan Snitkin, Ph.D. and Vincent Young, M.D., Ph.D., both members of the Departments of Microbiology & Immunology and Internal Medicine/Infectious Diseases at University of Michigan Medical School and Mary Hayden, M.D. of Rush University Medical Center, leveraged ongoing epidemiological studies focused on hospital-acquired infections that enabled them to analyze daily fecal samples from every patient within the intensive care unit at Rush University Medical Center over a nine-month period.
Arianna Miles-Jay, a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Snitkin’s lab, analyzed the over 1,100 patients in the study, and found that a little over 9% were colonized with C. diff. Using whole genome sequencing at U-M of 425 C. difficile strains isolated from nearly 4000 fecal specimens, she compared the strains to each other to analyze spread.
“By systematically culturing every patient, we thought we could understand how