Prevalence of Campylobacter concisus in Diarrhoea of Immunocompromised Patients

Abstract

The importance of Campylobacter species other than C. jejuni/coli in diarrhoeal disease is largely unknown. We wished to determine the prevalence and clinical presentation of C. concisus infection in patients with enteric disease in a tertiary hospital. Stool specimens were routinely tested for the presence of Campylobacter species, by use of the filter isolation method. The medical records of the C. concisus-positive patients were reviewed. Of 224 Campylobacter isolates obtained, 110 were identified as C. concisus. Concomitant infection occurred in only 27% of cases. By means of protein profiling we assigned C. concisus into 2 groups. The predominant C. concisus group 2 was the only strain to infect immunocompetent patients and children: 71% of the infected patients were immunocompromised, the majority being adults (84%). C. concisus may be a frequent cause of diarrhoea in immunocompromised patients. Two groups of C. concisus were found and these groups possibly vary in their pathogenic potential.

Immune status, antibiotic medication and pH are associated with changes in the stomach fluid microbiota

“…The identification of transcriptionally active C. concisus, a known oral commensal and intestinal pathogen with a suspected role in Crohn's disease (Man et al, 2010;Hess et al, 2012), represents an example of a microbial organism that could be important for intestinal disease but would not draw attention with traditional 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing-based techniques, due to the low relative abundance. It should be noted that C. concisus has been especially associated with intestinal pathogenicity in immunocompromised patients (Aabenhus et al, 2002) and that, among the five HC patient samples, the relative increase in C. concisus concentrations in RNA versus DNA isolates was even more pronounced in the single immunocompromised patient (#34) compared with the four other samples (1254% and 630%, respectively). In addition, all immunocompromised patient samples showed pH values above 6.0.…”

Characterization of a haemolytic phospholipase A2 activity in clinical isolates of Campylobacter concisus

“…Recently, C. concisus isolates from immunocompromised patients with diarrhoea were differentiated into two groups depending on protein profiles of whole-cell lysates, with 85 % of the isolates found to be from the same group (Aabenhus et al, 2002). Immunodiffusion analysis (Vandamme et al, 1989) and numerical analysis of AFLP profiles have also indicated the presence of two distinct genomospecies.…”

“…Therefore, it remains unclear whether the genotype of the majority of C. concisus RCH strains assigned to PCR group A (genomospecies A) resembles that of the majority of C. concisus strains isolated from immunocompromised patients (Aabenhus et al, 2002).…”

“…concisus is fastidious and characterized by low biochemical activity, which makes it hard to identify using conventional phenotypic techniques (Matsheka et al, 2001). Furthermore, molecular typing methods such as DNA-DNA hybridization (Vandamme et al, 1989), PFGE (Matsheka et al, 2002), PCR (Bastyns et al, 1995;Istivan et al, 1998) and protein profiling (Aabenhus et al, 2002) have shown it to comprise at least two molecular groups (genomospecies), which are phenotypically indistinguishable, but genetically divergent (Matsheka et al, 2002). Russell & Ward (1998) investigated C. concisus isolated at the Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne and showed that some isolates have the ability to adhere and invade HEp2 cells, at a rate 4-100-fold higher than the controls of pathogenic and invasive C. jejuni and C. coli strains.…”

“…concisus strains were isolated from children with diarrhoea in different countries (Russell, 1995;Lindblom et al, 1995;le Roux & Lastovica, 1998), and are known to be most common in some patient subgroups, mainly children under 24 months of age and immunocompromised patients (Engberg et al, 2000;Lastovica & le Roux, 2000;Aabenhus et al, 2002).…”