Pet Ownership May Protect Against Reoccurring Clostridioides Difficile Infection

by | Oct 26, 2020 | 2020, Alternative Therapies, Diarrhea, Digestive Health

Written by Joyce Smith, BS. This study reveals that increasing contact with pets was increasingly protective against CDI recurrence (CDI-R) in patients who acquired Clostridioides difficile Infection (CDI) in their community or a health-care facility.

pets mental healthCDI is a leading cause of antibiotic and health-care associated diarrhea in humans and 1 has increased in both severity and prevalence worldwide 2. In approximately 20-30% of CD patients, CDI is recurring (R-CDI) 3 and challenging to treat, often requiring longer periods of intervention and associated with increasing healthcare costs and mortality 4. Antibiotic use may contribute to the problem as in cases where reinfection with an identical strain occurs due to inadequate clearance of the original infection. 5 Pets have been implicated as a possible source of infection and spread of CDI among humans and animals, suggesting that transmission between species does occur, lending credence to the possibility that CDI may be a zoonotic disease 6,7.

To test this hypothesis, a case–control study 8 was conducted among 86 patients with recurrent CDI and 146 patients with nonrecurring CDI. Multivariable logistic regression modeling was used to determine the association between recurrence of CDI and pet ownership while accounting for patient comorbidities such as inflammatory bowel disease, gastric acid suppression or immunosuppression at the time of the initial diagnosis, and hospitalizations and antibiotic use. Of the 232 participants, 112 (48.3%) were pet owners of which 56 (50%) owned only dogs, 26 (23.2%) owned only cats, and 23 (20.5%) owned both cats and dogs.

Although the recurrence of CDI was not significantly associated with pet ownership among all 232 patients (OR, 1.02; 95% CI, 0.38–2.72; P = 0.965), among the subset of 127 patients with community-associated or community-onset health care facility-acquired CDI, a positive association was evident between increasing contact with pets and increasingly protection against CDI recurrence. Using a pet contact score of a possible 7 points, researchers found that the odds of CDI recurrence in this subset of 127 patients decreased by 3.5% for every point increase in pet contact (OR, 0.96; 95% CI, 0.87–1.07).  The total number of pets within a household did not affect CDI recurrence (OR, 1.03; 95% CI, 0.90–1.18). A potential explanation for these results may involve the beneficial contributions to the microbiota of pet owners afflicted with CDI. This type of benefit has occurred in other conditions such as atopy, obesity, and food allergies 9. However, further research is needed to understand the interactions between the microbiota of pet owners and their pets.

Study limitations include the retrospective aspect of this study, potential bias recall regarding CDI diagnosis, the absence of generalization because of small study size, the inability to identify the strain of CDI and lastly, the effect of therapy intervention, particularly antibiotic therapy. While the relationship between pet ownership and increasing contact with pets was not associated with recurrence of CDI in this study; it was shown to be protective against recurrence among patients with community-acquired or community-onset CDI.

Source: Redding, Laurel E., Brendan J. Kelly, Darko Stefanovski, John K. Lautenbach, Pam Tolomeo, Leigh Cressman, Eli Gruber, Paige Meily, and Ebbing Lautenbach. “Pet Ownership Protects Against Recurrence of Clostridioides difficile Infection.” In Open forum infectious diseases, vol. 7, no. 1, p. ofz541. US: Oxford University Press, 2020.

© The Author(s) 2020. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivs licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Click here to read the full text study.

Posted October 26, 2020.

Joyce Smith, BS, is a degreed laboratory technologist. She received her bachelor of arts with a major in Chemistry and a minor in Biology from  the University of Saskatchewan and her internship through the University of Saskatchewan College of Medicine and the Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. She currently resides in Bloomingdale, IL.

References:

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