Spinal cord injury patients are at high risk of catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTI), including infection by multi-drug resistant organisms. As well as impacting a patient’s quality of life and increasing their risk of life-threatening infection, CAUTIs increase hospital costs and can cause drug-resistant germs to spread.
Better monitoring patients to predict when they are at increased risk of CAUTI can enable physicians to intervene earlier and employ alternative strategies to prevent an infection, rather than relying solely on the use of antibiotics.
Work by AIMI faculty (A/Professor Diane McDougald, A/Prof Iain Duggin, and colleagues) shows that patients’ catheters are colonised by a diverse community of bacteria. Those communities change in species composition when there is a disturbance; for example, through inappropriate antibiotic therapy or colonisation with a pathogen that could lead to a CAUTI.
This discovery led to a New South Wales Health-funded project to develop a robust, simpler and cheaper methodology to monitor the microbial community for changes in composition, providing an early warning when a patient may be moving towards an infected status.
The project is also developing a mixed species biofilm system for laboratory evaluation of interventions aimed at controlling or eradicating biofilms on catheters. Our team will further use this laboratory system to investigate the mechanisms used by pathogenic bacteria to invade otherwise non-pathogenic microbial communities to cause infections. This will lead to new strategies for infection control and the development of novel diagnostic technologies to better treat and prevent infection within a high-risk patient population. The benefits would be improved quality of life, reduced mortalities, reduced spread of drug-resistant bacteria and significant cost savings to hospitals.
