Clostridium defficile Incidences among Emergency Department Patients

RM 210

Background: New emergent strains of Clostridium defficile (C.diff) over the past few years has resulted to be a significant health burden in the United States. Much of the literature, however, has highlighted clostridium defficile Infections (CDI) among inpatient cases, with limited studies among emergent department (ED) admissions. In this study, we focused on addressing such a gap in the literature. Methods: A multivariable regression analyses was conducted using California’s Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD) data software on 6,871,321 emergency department cases. Results: Prevalence of CDI was noted to be 1.87 per 1,000 emergency department hospitalizations. In this study, hospital and patient characteristics such as age, sex, race, insurance, zip code proportion of population in poverty, county group and (MUA) characteristics were assessed. It was observed that in the age category 5.6% of patients over the age of 65 years or older resulted with CDI. It was also observed that C.diff incidence percentile for women was 2.1% over men and 3.9% of these cases were Medicare patients. Conclusion: In this study is was observed that emergency department CDI cases is typically seen amongst women, seniors over the age of 65 and Medicare patient.