Hospitalized patients who are asymptomatic Clostridioides difficile carriers may infect people they live with after they return home, a study based on US insurance claim data suggests.
Although C. difficile infection (CDI) is considered to be a common hospital-acquired infection, reports of community-associated CDI in patients who have not been hospitalized are increasing, the authors write today in Emerging Infectious Diseases.

Aaron C. Miller, PhD
"Individuals in households where another family member was recently hospitalized but not diagnosed with a CDI appear to be at increased risk for CDI," said lead author Aaron C. Miller, PhD, a research assistant professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine in Iowa City. "When individuals are hospitalized, they may become colonized with C. difficile without developing symptoms and subsequently transmit the pathogen to other family members after they return home," he told Medscape Medical News by email.
Miller and his colleagues analyzed insurance claims data from 2001 through 2017 using the US Commercial Claims and Medicare Supplemental datasets of IBM MarketScan Research Databases. Over that period, they searched employer-sponsored commercial insurance claims and Medicare supplemental claims of 194,424 enrollees, and they linked claims from multiple family members in the same enrollment plan.