Hospitalization outcomes of patients with colorectal cancer (CRC) admitted with Clostridioides difficile colitis.

Abstract

e15649 Background: Clostridioides difficile colitis poses a significant healthcare burden and is a leading cause of diarrheal disease. Emerging studies have suggested that certain C. difficile strains may potentially drive colonic tumorigenesis and C. difficile was more frequently isolated from colorectal cancerous lesions compared to healthy tissue. In addition, cancer patients are more likely to receive antibiotics. These factors place CRC patients at a high risk of acquiring C. difficile infection. This national inpatient sample (NIS) study aims to study the hospitalization outcomes of patients with CRC admitted with C. difficile colitis. Methods: A retrospective analysis of the NIS database from 2016 to 2020 was conducted using International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) codes to identify hospitalizations with C. difficile colitis. STATA version SE18.0 was used for statistical analysis. We used multivariate regression analysis to calculate the effect on mortality, length of stay, ileus and cost of hospitalization of colorectal cancer along with other variables as listed below. Results: There were 246685 hospitalizations with a primary diagnosis of C. difficile colitis. Among these, 2250 patients had a secondary diagnosis of colorectal cancer. Multivariate logistic regression showed that CRC was associated with increased mortality with odds ratio (OR) of 2.24 [95% confidence interval (CI) 1.13-4.44, p-value = 0.02], ileus (OR of 1.99, 95% CI 1.16-3.41, p-value = 0.01) and cost of hospitalization (10,585$ higher than patients without CRC, p-value = 0.001). CRC was not associated with increased length of stay (OR of 1.31, 95% CI 0.63-1.99). The effect of other pertinent variables is summarized in Table 1. Conclusions: Among the analyzed variables, we observed that colorectal cancer was associated with increased mortality, ileus and total cost of hospitalization in patients admitted with C. difficile colitis. Limitations of this study include failure of the multivariate model to account for other possible variables, coding errors and risk of bias due to the retrospective nature of data. [Table: see text]