Linking clinical manifestations and causative organisms may provide clues for the treatment of peritoneal dialysis-associated peritonitis.

Introduction: Different initial manifestations of peritoneal dialysis-associated peritonitis (PDAP) may depend on the type of pathogenic organism. We investigated the association between the clinical characteristics of PDAP and susceptibility to vancomycin and investigated the possibility of using vancomycin monotherapy alone as an initial treatment regimen for some PDAP patients to avoid unnecessary antibiotic exposure and secondary infection.

Methods: Patients with culture-positive PDAP were retrospectively analyzed and divided into two groups: peritonitis with only cloudy effluent (PDAP-cloudy) or with cloudy effluent, abdominal pain and/or fever (PDAP-multi). The bacterial culture of PD effluent and antibiotic sensitivity test results were compared between groups. Logistic regression was used to investigate factors predicting susceptibility to vancomycin.

Results: Of 162 episodes of peritonitis which had a positive bacterial culture of PD fluid, 30 peritonitis were in the PDAP-cloudy group, and 132 peritonitis were in the PDAP-multi group. Thirty (100%) peritonitis in the PDAP-cloudy group had gram-positive bacterial infections, which was significantly greater than that in the PDAP-multi group (51.5%) (P < 0.001). Twenty-nine (96.7%) peritonitis in the PDAP-cloudy group were susceptible to vancomycin, compared to 67 (50.8%) in the PDAP-multi group (P < 0.001). The specificity of PDAP-cloudy for vancomycin-sensitive peritonitis was 98.48%. Only one patient (3.3%) in the PDAP-cloudy group experienced vancomycin-resistant peritonitis caused by Enterococcus gallinarum, which could neither be covered by vancomycin nor by the initial antibiotic regimen recommended by the current ISPD guidelines. The presence of only cloudy effluent was an independent predictor of susceptibility to vancomycin according to multivariate analysis (OR = 27.678, 95% CI 3.191-240.103, p = 0.003), in addition to PD effluent WBC counts (OR = 0.988, 95% CI 0.980-0.996, p = 0.004), diabetes mellitus (OR = 3.646, 95% CI 1.580-8.416, p = 0.002), first episode peritonitis (OR = 0.447, 95% CI 0.207-0.962, p = 0.039) and residual renal creatinine clearance (OR = 0.956, 95% CI 0.918-0.995, p = 0.027). Addition of these characteristics increased the AUC to 0.813 (95% CI 0.0.749-0.878, P < 0.001). The specificity of presenting with only cloudy effluent for vancomycin-sensitive peritonitis was 98.48%.

Conclusions: Cloudy dialysate, as the only symptom at PDAP onset, was an independent predictor of vancomycin-sensitive PDAP, which is an important new insight that may guide the choice of initial antibiotic treatment.