View clinical trials related to Clostridium Difficile.
Filter by:C-diff infection often causes belly pain and diarrhea and can be very hard to treat with medicine. One of the possible reasons that C-diff infection is hard to treat is because there is too much "bad" bacteria in the colon. Investigators believe that putting more "good" bacteria into the colon will help fight the "bad" bacteria. We do this by doing a fecal (poop) transplant. Fecal transplant has been done at other hospitals, but not at Nationwide Children's Hospital. Since our Investigators have not done this before, this study will help us learn the best way to do the transplant. Investigators also believe this transplant might help improve symptoms for patients with C-diff.
Clostridium difficile infection is the most common cause of antibiotic-associated diarrhea. Treatment of this infection usually occurs using other antibiotics, but many individuals have persistent diarrhea and multiple relapses. Fecal Transplant (FMT), or Intestinal Microbiota Transplantation, (IMT) has been shown to be efficacious when administered after treatment for C. difficile. This study will involve taking biopsies from patients during their FMT/IMT via colonoscopy, and determine if there are differences in the mucosal flora as compared to the stool flora. The investigators hope to discover the critical parts of a healthy microbiota.
The purpose of this study is to find whether Lactobacillus reuteri prevents antibiotic-associated diarrhea and related Clostridium difficile infections. Subjects will be admitted from the University Hospitals Case Medical Center. They will be randomly assigned to an intervention group receiving L. reuteri or a placebo. Supplementation will occur during antibiotic treatment and for an additional 7 days after cessation of treatment. Data collection will occur at baseline, end of antibiotic use, 7 days after antibiotic cessation, and 21 days after antibiotic cessation. Primary data includes diarrhea instances. Secondary data includes severity of diarrhea, presence of C. difficile toxins, and presence of other GI symptoms.
The investigators hypothesize that development of symptoms characteristic of Clostridium difficile infection will be 2-3 times higher in asymptomatic carriers, compared to that of non carriers and expect to find risk factors for development of symptomatic clostridium difficile.
This study will investigate a clostridium difficile vaccine in healthy adults aged 50 to 85 years, who will each receive 3 doses of vaccine. Subjects will receive their vaccine doses at either months 0, 1, and 3 or days 1, 8, and 30. Subjects will be divided into 2 age groups (50-64 and 65-85 years of age). The study will assess how safe and tolerable the vaccine is, and also look at subjects' immune response to the vaccine.
This study was developed in response to the July, 2013 FDA draft guidance regarding FMT for CDI. The weight of the evidence in the literature suggests that FMT is the most effective treatment for ambulatory outpatients affected by recurrent CDI who fail conventional therapy. The anticipated benefits to research patients enrolled in this study include resolution of chronic diarrhea, return of bowel habits and nutritional status to normal, and resolution of chronic recurrent CDI. FMT involves the endoscopic instillation of freshly obtained stool with millions of live bacteria into the recipient's colon by endoscopic lavage. With any endoscopic procedure, there is a risk of perforated viscous. This is very rare, but the risk is increased with severe CDI. The risk of acquisition of communicable enteric or blood borne pathogen appears to be negligible.
Clostridium difficile has become one of the leading causes of hospital acquired infections, and is associated with increased mortality. Patients with C. difficile associated disease (CDAD) possess deficiencies in 'normal' fecal microbial composition, most likely as a result of earlier antibiotic usage. The current standard of care treatment for severe C. difficile, which consists of antibiotics, does not restore the microbiota. Restoration of the normal colonic microbiota by fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) may enable reversion colonic microbial population to a more 'normal'state and lead to cure. A few patients develop severe CDAD which may be complicated by adynamic ileus, or toxic megacolon. The management in this context is based on limited data, and for some the only available option is sub-total colectomy. Although FMT is by no means a new therapeutic modality, there is limited information on its use for the treatment of acute CDAD, including severe CDAD. Because of the high morbidity and mortality associated with treatment of patients with severe CDAD, and because the evidence supporting the current recommendations is weak and based upon the demonstration that FMT is an effective strategy to re-establish a balanced intestinal microbiota with resultant cure of recurrent CDAD, we propose to study the efficacy and safety of FMT for severe CDAD. Patients with severe CDAD can be divided into two operational groups; those that have diarrhea and those that suffer from adynamic ileus. We propose to apply FMT through colonoscopy for all patients because current data suggest that the overall success rate of FMT for recurrent CDAD with lower gastrointestinal tract FMT was higher than FMT through the upper gastrointestinal tract. In addition, for patients with adynamic ileus and toxic megacolon (i.e., the population with the highest CDAD-associated morbidity and mortality), intra-colonic FMT administration is the preferred alternative.
The host gastrointestinal microbiota is significantly influenced by antibiotic treatment which might favor Clostridium difficile infection (CDI), a frequent cause of community- and hospital-acquired, potentially life-threatening diarrhoea. CDI is followed by recurrence in 19-35% of patients despite adequate first line antimicrobial therapy. Currently there is no standardized therapy of recurrent or refractory CDI, but recent studies show remarkable effects of fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT). In the current project, we aim to ideally match host and donor for FMT success in recurrent or refractory CDI. We will establish a clinical standard operating protocol for FMT, we will evaluate its safety and efficacy, and the patient acceptance and quality of life before and after FMT. We will analyse persistence of the donor microbiota within the recipient, define predictive clinical recipient and donor factors for FMT success and correlate them with microbial host and donor metagenomics. We hypothesize that our work will yield novel, individualized strategies for recurrent or refractory CDI. In perspective, our results may be expanded to treatment of other inflammory bowel diseases.
The colonic microbiome is essential in human health and disease. Clostridium difficile-associated diarrhea (CDAD), a highly morbid form of infectious diarrhea, is caused by antibiotics which perturb the microbiome and allow C. difficile to proliferate. Proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) are powerful suppressors of gastric acid and among the most common medicines in the United States. Dozens of observational studies show that longterm PPI use is associated with CDAD. However, the mechanism by which PPIs cause CDAD is unknown. We believe that PPIs cause CDAD by inducing alterations in the human colonic microbiome. We will confirm or refute the hypothesized mechanism for the association between PPIs and CDAD using an unblinded, single-armed study design. We will use pyrosequencing of the hypervariable V4 region of the bacterial 16S ribosomal subunit gene in human fecal samples to describe the colonic flora. We will collect fecal samples from volunteers before and after PPIs given for different durations and test the microbiome to determine 1) whether PPIs diminish overall diversity, 2) whether PPIs diminish relative abundance of Bacteroidetes, 3) whether increased duration of PPIs affects diversity, and 4) whether there is recovery of diversity after completing a defined course of PPIs. We believe that PPIs will cause a pattern of diminished overall microbiome diversity and reduced anaerobes — the same pattern seen after use of antibiotics. Furthermore, we believe that increased PPI duration will further diminish diversity and that the microbiome will return to pre-PPI levels of diversity after PPIs are stopped. These results will facilitate biologically-based clinical interventions to reduce rates of CDAD among patients who require acid suppression.
The inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), ulcerative colitis (UC) and Crohn's disease (CD) are chronic conditions affecting approximately 1.4 million Americans. The burden of Clostridium difficile infection (CDI), a frequent cause of infectious diarrhea is mediated by toxins A and B and is increasing faster in IBD patients, than the general population. Clinically, CDI in patients with IBD leads to a range of clinical syndromes from symptomless carriage, to severe life threatening colitis, colectomy and death. This pilot study will look at the relationship between IBD and this variable host immune response. Clostridium difficile colonization (asymptomatic carrier state) is lower in the IBD population than in the general population. In the general population, high antitoxin titers have been linked with colonization and low antitoxin titers with recurrent disease. The investigators hypothesize that patients with IBD will have a lower Clostridium difficile colonization and will have lower antibody titers than the control group. Additionally those with lower titers will have an increased risk of developing CDI. In Aim 1 the investigators will determine Clostridium colonization in IBD subjects by stool study (including CD, UC and UC patients after IPAA) compared to non-IBD subjects (controls). In Aim 2 the investigators will compare antitoxin titers in these IBD subjects compared to controls. In Aim 3 the investigators will follow these subjects for 12 months and calculate the incidence of CDI in patients with IBD compared to controls and associations with anti-toxin titers.