Prevalence of Multiple Antibiotic Resistant Infections in Diabetic versus Nondiabetic Wounds

Diabetes mellitus (DM) affects 23.6 million people in the USA and approximately 20-25% of diabetic patients will develop foot ulceration during the course of their disease. Up to a quarter of these patients will develop infections that will necessitate amputation. Although many studies report that the rates of antibiotic resistant infections have increased dramatically in the DM population over the last decade, to our knowledge there have been no reports directly comparing the rates of antibiotic resistant infections in DM versus non-DM wounds. We performed a retrospective study comparing the wound infections of 41 DM patients to those of 74 non-DM patients to test the hypothesis that infections with multidrug resistant organisms (MDRO) were more prevalent in the DM population. We found that 63.4% of DM and 50% of non-DM patients had MDRO infections, which was not statistically different. However, 61% of the DM patients had Pseudomonas infections compared to only 18.9% of non-DM patients. Furthermore, DM patients had significantly more coinfections with both Pseudomonas and Staphylococcus aureus. Though our initial hypothesis was incorrect, we demonstrated a significant correlation between Pseudomonas and Pseudomonas/S. aureus coinfections within DM wounds.