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MILWAUKEE, Sept. 26 — A Clostridium difficile infection sharply increases the risk of death for patients with underlying inflammatory bowel disease, researchers here said. Action Points
Explain to interested patients that disease associated with Clostridium difficile has been increasing in incidence for several years, and is often associated with mortality in the hospital setting.

Note that this study suggests that C. difficile disease is especially dangerous in patients with inflammatory bowel disease.

People admitted to the hospital with a combination of C. difficile and either Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis were nearly five times as likely to die as those admitted for inflammatory bowel disease alone, according to David Binion, M.D., and colleagues, at Wisconsin College of Medicine.

They were also more likely to die than patients admitted with just C. difficile associated disease, Dr. Binion and colleagues reported in the online issue of Gut.

Doctors should engage in “prudent use of antibiotics” patients with inflammatory bowel disease to reduce the incidence of C. difficile disease, the researchers said.

Their findings came from an analysis of the Men’s healthcare Cost and Utilization Project’s Nationwide Inpatient Sample for 2003. The sample for that year covered 37 states, 994 hospitals of all sizes and types, and more than 38 million discharges.

The investigators found that the discharge diagnosis was both C. difficile and inflammatory bowel disease in 2,804 cases, C. difficile alone in 44,400 cases, and inflammatory bowel disease alone in 77,366 cases.

A multivariate analysis showed that:

Patients with both conditions were significantly more likely (at P

This entry was posted on Friday, April 27th, 2007 at 8:09 am and is filed under Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.