IBD an independent risk factor for C. difficile

Clostridium difficile (C.difficile) infection is more common in patients with inflammatory bowel disease in clinical remission than healthy individuals, an Irish study has found. C. difficile infection may delay diagnosis in newly presenting IBD patients, trigger relapse of established disease, confound therapies, and signal an underlying defect in innate immunity, the researchers wrote in the American Journal of Gastroenterology. Their study compared C. difficile carriage in 64 outpatients with long-standing diagnoses of ulcerative colitis, 58 outpatients with Crohn’s disease, and 99 healthy individuals without gastrointestinal symptoms. All patients were in clinical remission, had not had a recent hospitalisation and had no recent exposure to antibiotics, corticosteroids or immunomodulatory drugs. The frequency of toxigenic C. difficile was significantly more common in IBD patients than in healthy volunteers (8.2% vs and 1%). Strains isolated from infected IBD outpatients showed considerable diversity, which the researchers said suggested that infection had not emerged as a result of recent horizontal transfer from a common source....