Looking at the Mycobiome to Distinguish Clostridium difficile Infection vs. Carriage

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Y Cao et al. Gastroenterol 2021; 160: 2328-2339. Fecal Mycobiota Combined With Host Immune Factors Distinguish Clostridioides difficile Infection From Asymptomatic Carriage

Key findings:

  • The ratio of Ascomycota to Basidiomycota was dramatically higher in patients with CDI than in Carrier and Control (P < .05).
  • Using 4 fungal operational taxonomic units combined with 6 host immune markers in the random forest classifier can achieve very high performance (area under the curve ∼92.38%) in distinguishing patients with CDI from Carrier.

My take: It is interesting that fecal fungal diversity (mycobiome), in addition to bacterial diversity, is reduced in those with Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) compared to both control groups and those with Clostridium difficile asymptomatic carriage.

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