What is it about?
Clostridioides difficile causes diarrhoea and colitis, often after antibiotics, and in many patients the infection returns after treatment, worsening quality of life and increasing costs. The damage is mainly caused by toxins produced by the bacterium. Bezlotoxumab is a monoclonal antibody that neutralizes toxin B and is approved to prevent recurrences. In this narrative review we explain how C. difficile causes disease and how bezlotoxumab works, and we summarize the evidence on its efficacy, effectiveness and safety from clinical trials and real-world studies. Bezlotoxumab clearly reduces recurrences in trials, but real-life experience is still limited and mostly based on case series without comparison groups.
Featured Image
Photo by Mufid Majnun on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Recurrent C. difficile infection is one of the most difficult problems in hospital medicine. This review gives clinicians a clear overview of an important prevention tool, highlighting both its proven benefits and the need for further studies comparing it with other strategies such as fidaxomicin and faecal microbiota transplantation, to define which patients benefit most.
Perspectives
Clostridioides difficile has been at the core of my research for years, and recurrences are what patients fear most. This review, written with colleagues from Genoa and Rome, aims to help clinicians decide when to use bezlotoxumab, a smart approach that targets the toxin rather than the bacterium.
Professor Stefano Di Bella
Universita degli Studi di Trieste
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Bezlotoxumab for Preventing Recurrent Clostridioides difficile Infection: A Narrative Review from Pathophysiology to Clinical Studies, Infectious Diseases and Therapy, July 2020, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/s40121-020-00314-5.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
