Background:

pseudomembranous colitis is a disease caused by Clostridium difficile in recent times has attracted the attention of the medical community, due to an increase in the incidence in health institutions, as well as in the community, motivated by the more frequent use and sometimes not ordered antimicrobials.

Objective:

to describe a case of a patient with a postmortem diagnosis of pseudomembranous colitis.

Clinical case:

a 71-year-old male patient with a history of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and mitral prosthetic valve to receive from several months prophylactic antimicrobial cycles every month to avoid respiratory infections, who is admitted due to scarce diarrheic stools, but frequent with abundant blood and mucus accompanied by fever and abdominal pain, with an intra-hospital torpid evolution until his death, performing the diagnosis of pseudomembranous colitis in the necropsy study.

Conclusions:

the pseudomembranous colitis produced by Clostridium difficile is a disease that has to be kept in mind in the diagnoses of hospitalized patients who are under antimicrobial treatment or who come from the community where they were prescribed with this type of drugs.

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