Antibiotics
Clostridioides difficile Infection in a Romanian Tertiary Care Hospital: Epidemiology, Comorbidity Burden, Treatment Patterns, and Mortality Outcomes (2023–2025)
By Tania Vlad, Daliborca Cristina Vlad, Călin Muntean and 5 others.
Abstract
Background
Real-world outcome data on Clostridioides difficile infection (CDI) from Eastern Europe are scarce, and partly digitised hospital records make surveillance laborious. We characterised the epidemiology, comorbidity, treatment and in-hospital mortality of CDI in a Romanian tertiary hospital and validated a rule-based pipeline for extracting surveillance variables from free-text records.
Methods
Retrospective two-period cohort (1 September 2023 to 31 December 2025) of 295 CDI episodes at the Pius Brinzeu County Emergency Clinical Hospital, Timisoara. Thirty variables were extracted from narrative records with a lexical algorithm applied identically to both periods and validated against manual coding (n = 144). Mortality predictors were analysed by logistic regression with LASSO selection, bootstrap-corrected discrimination and calibration testing.