Level playing field for Clostridium difficile diagnosis

The largest study of its kind, carried out by experts at the University of Leeds, has shown the most effective test for the diagnosis of Clostridium difficile (C-Diff). C-Diff is a bacterial infection which causes 3,000 deaths a year in Britain. It affects the digestive system, and is most common in hospital patients treated with antibiotics for other infections. The multi-centre study, carried out by researchers at the University of Leeds, in partnership with colleagues from the University of Oxford, University College London and St George’s, University of London, tested more than 12,000 faecal samples from hospital patients to establish the best method for diagnosing C-Diff. The study compared the main different ways of diagnosing C-Diff, including the two ‘gold-standard’ methods: a cytotoxin assay, which looks for the presence of C-Diff toxin in faecal samples; and cytotoxigenic culture, which looks to see if there are bugs present in faecal samples that could possibly produce C-Diff toxin. The research team found that patients with faecal samples positive by the cytotoxin assay were almost twice as likely to die within 30 days as those patients with samples only positive by the alternative ‘gold-standard’ method (16.6% versus 9. The findings mean that tests which detect the presence of toxin in faecal samples (the cytotoxin assay) are the most reliable indicators of true C-Diff.