Candida bloodstream infection in patients with systemic autoimmune diseases.

OBJECTIVES: To describe the epidemiological, clinical and microbiological characteristics and mortality of patients with Candida bloodstream infection and systemic autoimmune diseases. METHODS: We performed a retrospective multicenter study of candidemia in adults with systemic autoimmune diseases between 2010 and 2016. RESULTS: Among 1040 patients with candidemia, 36 (3.5%) had a systemic autoimmune disease. The most common systemic autoimmune disease was rheumatoid arthritis (27.8%). The most common species was Candida albicans (66.7%). Twenty-two (61.1%) patients received a corticosteroid therapy and nine (25%) received an immunosuppressive therapy at the time of candidemia. The mortality rate was 27.8%. CONCLUSIONS: Systemic autoimmune diseases are not common in patients with candidemia. The unadjusted mortality rate was comparable to other candidemia studies in the general population.

The updated Charlson comorbidity index is a useful predictor of mortality in patients with Staphylococcus aureus bacteraemia.

The objective was to compare the performance of the updated Charlson comorbidity index (uCCI) and classical CCI (cCCI) in predicting 30-day mortality in patients with Staphylococcus aureus bacteraemia (SAB). All cases of SAB in patients aged ⩾14 years identified at the Microbiology Unit were included prospectively and followed. Comorbidity was evaluated using the cCCI and uCCI. Relevant variables associated with SAB-related mortality, along with cCCI or uCCI scores, were entered into multivariate logistic regression models. Global model fit, model calibration and predictive validity of each model were evaluated and compared. In total, 257 episodes of SAB in 239 patients were included (mean age 74 years; 65% were male). The mean cCCI and uCCI scores were 3.6 (standard deviation, 2.4) and 2.9 (2.3), respectively; 161 (63%) cases had cCCI score ⩾3 and 89 (35%) cases had uCCI score ⩾4. Sixty-five (25%) patients died within 30 days. The cCCI score was not related to mortality in any model, but uCCI score ⩾4 was an independent factor of 30-day mortality (odds ratio, 1.98; 95% confidence interval, 1.05-3.74). The uCCI is a more up-to-date, refined and parsimonious prognostic mortality score than the cCCI; it may thus serve better than the latter in the identification of patients with SAB with worse prognoses.

Mechanisms of resistance to daptomycin in Staphylococcus aureus.

Daptomycin is a cyclic lipopeptide active against multidrug-resistant Gram-positives, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and S. aureus with reduced susceptibility to vancomycin. It is 4-8 fold as active as vancomycin against methicillin-susceptible S. aureus (MSSA) and MRSA, and retains most of this activity against S. aureus with reduced susceptibility to vancomycin. The mechanism of action of daptomycin is not fully understood. Daptomycin binds to the bacterial cytoplasmic membrane, leading to depolarization due to the loss of potassium ions from the cytoplasm. Daptomycin non-susceptibility is unusual in the clinical setting. Different mechanisms have been proposed to explain daptomycin-resistance, most of them associated to changes in composition, charge and fluidity of the cell wall. The mprF mutations, which lead to an increase in the lysyl-phosphatidyl glycerol production, and rpoB and rpoC mutations (rpo genes encode for bacterial RNA polymerase subunits) have been proposed as associated to daptomycin-resistance, but a number of mutations in other genes ( walK, cls, ggrA…) have been proposed.

Pretreatment of urine samples with SDS improves direct identification of urinary tract pathogens with matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization-time of flight mass spectrometry.

We pretreated with SDS 71 urine samples with bacterial counts of >10(5) CFU/ml and matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization-time of flight (MALDI-TOF) identification scores of <2, in order to minimize failure rates. Identification improved in 46.5% of samples, remained unchanged in 49.3%, and worsened in 4.2%. The improvement was more evident for Gram-negative (54.3%) than for Gram-positive (32%) bacteria.