A study published in the journal Genome Medicine shows the bacteria in people's gut may predict their risk of life-threatening blood infections following high-dose chemotherapy, as reported by Infection Control Today.
Dan Knights, PhD, assistant professor in the department of computer science and engineering and the Biotechnology Institute at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and co-author of the study, and colleagues collected fecal samples from 28 patients with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma before the patients began chemotherapy.
Here are three points:
1. Eleven of the 28 subjects acquired a bloodstream infection following their chemotherapy.
2. The infected patients had significantly different mixtures of gut bacteria than the patients who did not get infections.
3. The researchers caution that their findings are based on a limited number of patients with a single type of chemotherapy at a single clinic, so their next step is to validate their approach in a much larger cohort including patients with different cancer types, different treatment types and from multiple treatment centers.