Children with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) are disproportionately susceptible to Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) and the incidence is increasing. There has also been growing recognition of asymptomatic C. difficile colonization in pediatric IBD, which can sometimes be very difficult to distinguish from symptomatic C. difficile-associated disease in this population. In this study, we d...

Gut microbiota is a compilation of microorganisms dwelling in the entire mammalian gastrointestinal tract. They display a symbiotic relationship with the host contributing to its intestinal health and disease. Even a slight fluctuation in this equipoise may be deleterious to the host, leading to many pathological conditions like Clostridium difficile infection or inflammatory bowel disease (IBD...

Infections caused by Clostridium difficile have increased steadily over the past several years. While studies on C. difficile virulence and physiology have been hindered, in the past, by lack of genetic approaches and suitable animal models, newly developed technologies and animal models allow these processes to be studied in detail. One such advance is the generation of a mouse-model of C. dif...

BACKGROUND Accurate diagnosis of Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) is paramount for patient management. The wrong diagnosis places patients at risk, delays treatment, and/ or contributes to transmission of infection in the healthcare setting. Although amplification of the toxin B gene by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is a sensitive method for detecting toxigenic C. difficile, false negati...

The entire process of Clostridium difficile colonization to infection develops in large intestine. However, the real colonization pattern of C. difficile in preoperative colorectal cancer patients has not been studied. In this study, 33 C. difficile strains (16.1%) were isolated from stool samples of 205 preoperative colorectal cancer patients. C. difficile colonization rates in lymph node meta...

The disease spectrum caused by Clostridium difficile infection ranges from antibiotic-associated diarrhoea to life-threatening clinical manifestations such as pseudomembranous colitis. C. difficile infection is precipitated by antimicrobial therapy that causes a disruption of the normal colonic microbiota, predisposing to C. difficile intestinal colonisation. The pathogenicity of C. difficile i...

HYPOTHESIS Bowel preparation traditionally consists of cathartics, oral antibiotics, and intravenous antibiotics. We hypothesize that the use of oral antibiotics in bowel preparation results in a higher rate of postoperative Clostridium difficile colitis. DESIGN Retrospective case-controlled study of elective colon surgery patients; January 1997 to June 2003. SETTING Tertiary care veterans ...

This is the first study to provide a comprehensive insight into the molecular epidemiology of endemic Clostridium difficile and particularly that associated with a recently recognized epidemic strain. We DNA fingerprinted all C. difficile isolates from the stools of patients with symptomatic antibiotic-associated diarrhoea and from repeated samples of the inanimate ward environment on two elder...

C lostridium difficile is a bacterium that causes inflammation of the part of the intestine called the colon. It is sometimes called C diff for short. These bacteria are found in feces (bowel movement). A major risk factor for getting a C difficile infection is being on antibiotics. People can also become infected by C difficile if they touch an object such as a toy or a surface such as a count...

Introduction....................................................................................................................................2 Clostridium difficile — Biology and Pathogenesis.........................................................................2 Biology............................................................................................................................