Species identification of Candida strains isolated from patients with Candidemia, hospitalized in Tehran, by enzymatic digestion of ITS - rDNA

Candidemia is a very important infection in terms of incidence and mortality that caused by several species of the genus Candida and should be treated quickly. Even though Candida albicans is still the most common causative of Candidemia however, incidence of the blood infections due to non C. albicans species has increased in recent years. Species identification is necessary from the viewpoints of continuous epidemiological survey and susceptibility or resistance of different species to the antifungal drugs. In the current study a total of 48 different clinical isolates of Candida, obtained from blood specimens cultures belonging to 32 immunocompromised patients with candidemia who were hospitalized in some therapeutic centers in Tehran, were identified at the species level by a set of PCR-RFLP assays. The results indicated that species of C. parapsilosis, C. glabrata and C. albicans were respectively the most frequent agents. These findings were unexpected and should be considered because, C. albicans is almost always the most common cause of both candidemia and all clinical forms of candidiasis while, among the isolates of the current study it only ranked third in terms of abundance. Given to the relatively low number of studied isolates, it seems that a larger study is needed to confirm these results.