Abstract
Background: Humans can develop both acute and chronic infections from Pseudomonas aeruginosa. This bacterium is a prominent cause of nosocomial infections in addition to respiratory infections, urinary tract infections, burns, wounds, ear, eye, and bloodstream infections. The objective of this study was to identify antibiotic resistance in P. aeruginosa strains obtained from hospitalized patients as well as to assess the frequency of virulence genes.
Methods: In this cross-sectional study, 86 strains of P. aeruginosa were isolated from patients hospitalized of different wards of hospitals in Shiraz and Yasuj in 2021. Disk diffusion was used for the antibiotic susceptibility test, and the PCR method and particular primers were used to evaluate the frequency of the virulence genes (aprA, phzM, phzS) and antibiotic resistance genes (blaGES, blaSPM, blaVIM).
Results: In the present study, P. aeruginosa isolates showed the highest antibiotic resistance to meropenem and piperacillin-tazobactam the lowest resistance to colistin. The results of PCR test for amplification of aprA, phzM, and phzS genes showed that the highest frequency among the isolates was related to aprA gene with 98.8% frequency. The frequency of phzM and phzS genes was 96.5% and91.9%, respectively.
Conclusion: In this study, a high percentage of virulence genes aprA, phzM,and phzS were observed in P. aeruginosa isolates. Due to the antibiotic resistance P. aeruginosa to many antibiotics, clinicians should be careful in prescribing antibiotics, especially in infections caused by this bacterium.
Keywords
Pseudomonas aeruginosa Virulence Factor Antibiotic Resistance Hospitalized patients
Copyright
© 2024, Author(s). This open-access article is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which allows for unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original work is properly cited.