Typing of Clostridium difficile strains isolated from children by different molecular methods

Clostridium difficile causes intestinal diseases ranging from self-limiting diarrhoea to pseudomembranous colitis predominantly in elderly and in hospitalized patients. In young children the carriage is asymptomatic, but the carriage rate may be as high as 63%. Additionally, some serogroups (e.g. F and X) are more likely to be isolated in children, while others (A1, C, G, H) are associated with the disease itself. Molecular typing methods are also widely used for investigating the epidemiology of C. difficile infections and some genotypes prevail among outbreak-associated strains. In the present study we used two molecular typing methods, arbitrarily primed polymerase chain reaction (AP-PCR) and pulsed-field gel electrophoresis, to investigate the genetic heterogeneity of strains isolated from children aged 2 years or less.