The Epidemiology of Clostridium difficile Infections Among Oncology Patients

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Peter Longley from the Yale-New Haven Hospital’s Data Analytics Team and Linda Sullivan for their help in obtaining data for the study. • Clostridium difficile is a gram-positive, anaerobic bacterium that is the leading cause of hospital-acquired diarrhea. • C. difficile infection (CDI) has a wide variety of clinical presentations, ranging from asymptomatic carriage to mild self-limited diarrhea, pseudomembrane colitis, toxic megacolon perforation, and sepsis. • Previously established risk factors for CDI include increasing age, severity of underlying diseases, non-surgical gastrointestinal procedures, nasogastric tubes, anti-ulcer medications, increasing duration of hospital stay, increasing duration of antibiotic course, use of multiple antibiotics, and immunosuppression. • Patients immunosuppressed due to corticosteroids and chemotherapy or due to underlying conditions such as hematologic malignancies, HIV, and other autoimmune disorders are at higher risk of developing severe CDI resulting in fulminant colitis, colectomy, or death. • Cancer patients are a particular group of immunosuppressed individuals susceptible to C. difficile infection, as various classes of chemotherapeutic agents have been associated with C. difficile colitis, and having both chemotherapy and exposure to antibiotics increases the risk. • Research has been limited in showing consistent associations between types of cancer treatments, types of cancers, and antibiotics with CDI in cancer patients. • This study will address this gap in the current literature and aim to identify risk factors associated with C. difficile infections in cancer patients by assessing various demographic and clinical variables as well as previous medical history including prior antibiotic use and types of cancer treatment received. Discussion and Conclusions Univariate and Multivariate Logistic Regression Descriptive Statistics