This article is concerned with Clostridium difficile infection, also known by its abbreviation CDI, and its relationship to depression and anti-depressant medications.  Clostridium difficile infection is the most common cause of antibiotic-associated diarrhea.  While I first read this article’s abstract, I didn’t think that it was a very serious topic in terms of health problems.  But in the article’s background section, it states that CDI causes more than seven thousand deaths in the United States of America each year and is apparently also prevalent in Europe as well.  This study wanted to see if depression or anti-depressant medications were responsible for increasing a person’s chances of getting CDI.  Past research suggested that the use of anti-depressant medication did increase the risk, so this study is going further into this line of research and seeing if it’s the medication or the disorder itself that is causing this increased chance of CDI.  This study was actually a two part one.  The first part was a longitudinal study to determine population rates of people with CDI, both with and without depression.  The second part was a hospital-based control study meant to assess the association between anti-depressant use and hospital-acquired CDI.  These two parts were used comparatively to see which aspect of depression and its treatment was increasing the risk of CDI.  The study found that people with depression or who report being sad, including widows and widowers, have a higher chance of developing CDI.  Also certain anti-depressants may increase the risk, particularly the combination of trazodone and mirtazapine.