Assignment: Clostridium difficile Colitis

Assignment: Clostridium difficile Colitis

Assignment: Develop a care plan for a patient that has a Clostridium difficile Colitis

This week you will need to look at the provided and develop a care plan for a patient that has a Clostridium difficile Colitis. Please use the provided format for building your care plan. You will need to use your nursing reference materials as you build this care plan.

The name “Clostridium difficile” (C. difficile) comes from the Greek word “Kloster” which means spindle. It was first mentioned in the literature in 1935 by Hall and O’Toole []. At first, the bacterium was given the name “Bacillus difficilis.” (Latin: difficilis, meaning difficult). This was because of the difficulty encountered isolating the bacteria and also the fact that it had a very slow growth phase during culturing. The name was subsequently changed in the 1970s to C. difficile.

Clostridium difficile is a gram-positive, anaerobic bacillus, which is found widely in the environment, especially in the soil. Despite the fact that even in the first known description of C. difficile the authors had mentioned its deadly effects on mice, the complete virulence of the bacterium was not properly recognized until much later. During World War II, Hambre et al. [] observed using animal models that mice treated for gas gangrene with penicillin suffered from a very severe form of typhlitis. This in fact turned out to be even more deadly than the gangrene itself caused by Clostridium perfringens. This discovery led to new tests in which researchers gave rodents different kinds of antibiotics watching for the development of very similar symptoms. Green [] used guinea pigs in his experiments, during which he was able to induce death by giving them large doses of penicillin. He then studied the stool of the dead guinea pigs and discovered the presence of cytoplasmic changes within. This was the first description of C. difficile toxin. It was Cohen and colleagues [] who actually documented the connection between pseudomembranous colitis and antibiotic therapy. One year after the publication of this association, Tadesco et al. [] had noticed that patients treated with clindamycin (almost 21 %) suffered from diarrhea and (10 %) were diagnosed with pseudomembranous colitis. This trial involved over 200 patients and was the first trial in which endoscopy was used so routinely on such a large group of patients. It led to the identification of C. difficile as a causative factor for multiple ailments involving the digestive system.