Blastocystis sp. subtype 4 is common in Danish Blastocystis-positive patients presenting with acute diarrhea - PubMed (original) (raw)

Blastocystis sp. subtype 4 is common in Danish Blastocystis-positive patients presenting with acute diarrhea

Christen Rune Stensvold et al. Am J Trop Med Hyg. 2011 Jun.

Abstract

Fecal samples from 444 Danish patients presenting with acute diarrhea were tested for Blastocystis and positive samples were subtyped to investigate the prevalence and subtype distribution of Blastocystis in this patient group. A total of 25 patients (5.6%) were positive, and 19 of these patients (76.0%) were positive for Blastocystis sp. ST4. Because the relative prevalence of ST4 in other patients presenting with other types of diarrhea (persistent, travel-related, and human immunodeficiency virus-related) in Denmark is low, the role of Blastocystis sp. ST4 in the etiology of acute diarrhea should be investigated further.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Phylogenetic analysis of 13 sequences generated in the study and ST4 reference sequences from GenBank; a ST3 sequence (AB091234) was used as outlier. The evolutionary history was inferred using the Neighbor-Joining method. The optimal tree with the sum of branch length = 0.08200042 is shown. The percentage of replicate trees in which the associated taxa clustered together in the bootstrap test (1,000 replicates) is shown next to the branches. The tree is drawn to scale, with branch lengths in the same units as those of the evolutionary distances used to infer the phylogenetic tree. The evolutionary distances were computed using the Maximum Composite Likelihood method and are in the units of the number of base substitutions per site. The rate variation among sites was modeled with a gamma distribution (shape parameter = 0.5). The differences in the composition bias among sequences were considered in evolutionary comparisons. All positions containing alignment gaps and missing data were eliminated only in pairwise sequence comparisons (Pairwise deletion option). There was a total of 384 positions in the final dataset.

References

    1. Stensvold CR, Nielsen HV, Mølbak K, Smith HV. Pursuing the clinical significance of Blastocystis–diagnostic limitations. Trends Parasitol. 2009;25:23–29. - PubMed
    1. Tan KS. New insights on classification, identification, and clinical relevance of Blastocystis spp. Clin Microbiol Rev. 2008;21:639–665. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Stensvold CR, Alfellani MA, Nørskov-Lauritsen S, Prip K, Victory EL, Maddox C, Nielsen HV, Clark CG. Subtype distribution of Blastocystis isolates from synanthropic and zoo animals and identification of a new subtype. Int J Parasitol. 2009;39:473–479. - PubMed
    1. Stensvold CR, Suresh GK, Tan KS, Thompson RC, Traub RJ, Viscogliosi E, Yoshikawa H, Clark CG. Terminology for Blastocystis subtypes–a consensus. Trends Parasitol. 2007;23:93–96. - PubMed
    1. Parkar U, Traub RJ, Vitali S, Elliot A, Levecke B, Robertson I, Geurden T, Steele J, Drake B, Thompson RC. Molecular characterization of Blastocystis isolates from zoo animals and their animal-keepers. Vet Parasitol. 2010;169:8–17. - PubMed

MeSH terms

Substances

LinkOut - more resources