Isolation of Clostridium in Human Infections: Evaluation of 114 Cases

Abstract

One hundred fifty-two strains of Clostridium were isolated from 144 patients over a 14-month-peroid. These included 23 recognized species and 23 strains that were unclassified. Soft tissues or abscesses yielded 84 strains of Clostridium. Intraabdominal sites predominated, but clostridia were recovered from empyema, carcinoma, frostbite with gas gangrene, muscle abscess, aortic graft, and brain abscess. Blood cultures yielded 65 strains of Clostridium from 49 patients, representing 0.3% of 16,314 blood cultures (or 2.6% of 2,168 positive cultures). Clostridium perfringens was most common in blood, accounting for 37 isolates (57%). Clostridial bacteremia was often unrelated to the clinical setting and was found in alcoholics with aspiration or Streptococcus pneumoniae pneumonia, pulmonary tuberculosis, empyema, meningococcemia, and infantile gastroenteritis. In 20 of the 49 patients (41%), aerobic or other anaerobic bacteria were cultured concurrently from the blood. Thus, clostridial bacteremia should be interpreted with caution since there may be little correlation with the patient's clinical condition.

Gut microbiome compositional and functional differences between tumor and non-tumor adjacent tissues from cohorts from the US and Spain

“…Early studies showed a direct correlation between increased abundance of Bacteroides sp., Streptococcus gallolyticus (formerly S. bovis), and Clostridium sp in CRC patients. [24][25][26] More recently, microbiome studies using next-generation sequencing approaches have shown that a decrease in bacterial diversity in the gut microbiota was associated with higher CRC risk in stool samples. 21 Moreover, CRC patients have a distinct gut bacterial community composition with increased abundance of Fusobacterium, Porphyromonas (which have been related to inflammation 21,27,28 ), Coriobacteridae and Roseburia 29 and decreased abundance of Firmicutes, specifically Clostridia (involved in fermentation of dietary fiber 30 ) and Enterobacteriaceae 29 in both stool and mucosal samples.…”

Clostridium difficile: clinical disease and diagnosis

“…However, subsequent investigations of this issue have failed to confirm these observations (90,186,199). The etiologic agent C. difficile has been isolated infrequently from other human sources (109,110,250 (15,104,163,170,171,254,260,261,271). The enterotoxin was found to be 100-to 1,000-fold less cytotoxic than the cytotoxin and demonstrated a fluid response when tested in ligated ileal loops.…”

Clostridium subterminale Septicemia in a Recipient of Allogeneic Cord Blood Transplantation

“…Clostridium subterminale (C subterminale) is one of the Clostridium species most frequently isolated from the soil. To the best of our knowledge, only three cases of infection due to C. subterminale (one case of pleuropulmonary infection and the other two consisting of soft tissue infections) have been reported in adults in the English-language medical literature (2,3). This is the first reported case of septicemia due to C. subterminale.…”