Performance of Clostridioides difficile infection severity scores and risk factors related to 30-day all-cause mortality in patients with cancer

Purpose There are currently no standard definitions for assessing the severity of Clostridioides difficile infection (CDI) in cancer patients. We evaluated the performance of scoring systems for severity and analyzed risk factors for mortality in a cancer cohort. Methods We conducted an observational study in patients with cancer and CDI. We calculated the incidence of hospital-onset (HO-CDI) and community-onset health-care facility associated (CO-HCFA-CDI) episodes. We classified severity using five prognostic scales and calculated sensitivity, specificity, positive (PPV), and negative predictive values (NPV) for mortality and intensive care unit (ICU) admission. In addition, multivariate regression was performed to assess variables associated with mortality. Results The HO-CDI and CO-HCFA-CDI incidence rates were 3.7 cases/10,000 patient-days and 1.9 cases/1,000 admissions, respectively. ESCMID criteria showed the higher sensitivity (97%, 95% CI; 85–100%) and NPV (98%, 95% CI; 85–100%), while ATLAS (≥ 6 points) had the highest specificity (95%, 95% CI; 90–98%) for 30-day all-cause mortality; similar performance was observed for ICU admission. Characteristics associated with fatal outcome were neutropenia (≤ 100 cells/ml) (aOR; 3.03, 95% CI; 1.05–8.74, p = 0.040), male gender (aOR; 2.90, 95% CI; 1.08–7.80, p = 0.034), high serum creatinine (aOR; 1.71, 95% CI; 1.09–2.70, p = 0.020), and albumin (aOR; 0.17, 95% CI; 0.07–0.42, p < 0.001). Conclusions Some of the current scales may not be appropriate to discriminate severity in patients with cancer. The variables in this study associated with unfavorable outcomes could be evaluated in prospective studies to develop prognostic scores that identify susceptible patients, especially in immunocompromised populations.