Prospective study of chemotherapy-induced clostridium difficile infection in lung cancer patients.

e19521 Background: Diarrhea after antibiotic treatment is primarily ascribed to the development of mucosal lesion for which Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) is held responsible. Evidence on CDI in patients on chemotherapy without antibiotic treatment prior to chemotherapy is on the rise. However there have been few reports describing diarrhea in relation to regimens of chemotherapy. The aim of our study was to find out whether the incidence of CDI in patients on cancer chemotherapy increases even in the absence of prior antibiotic treatment. Methods: From March 2010 through September 2011, we investigated the presence of Clostridium difficile (C.difficile) and its toxin in any patients undergoing diarrhea while receiving cytotoxic anticancer agents or epidermal growth factor receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitors. Whenever Grade2 or worse diarrhea defined by the Common Terminology Criteria for Adverse Events version4 occurred, we examined their stool samples for anaerobic culture and simultaneously test...