Molecular characterization and antimicrobial susceptibility of hemolytic Streptococcus agalactiae from post-menopausal women Moltó-García, Belén Liébana Martos, María del Carmen Cuadros-Moronta, Elena Rodríguez-Granger, Javier Sampedro-Martínez, Antonio Rosa Fraile, Manuel de la Gutiérrez Fernández, José Puertas-Priet, Alberto Navarro-Marí, José María Serotype Sequence type Characterization Postmenopausal The authors declare funding received by University Hospital Virgen de las Nieves (Granada) in study design; in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data for this article. Purpose: Streptococcus agalactiae (Group B streptococcus, GBS) is increasingly recognized as a pathogen in adult populations, including the elderly. Appropriate treatment involves antibiotics. An alternative to this strategy would be the administration of a polysaccharide vaccine therefore the capsular serotypes and molecular characterization of circulating strains needs to be known. Few studies have been conducted in this population. Methods: One hundred and seven GBS isolates collected from vagino-rectal swabs from 600 post-menopausal women were analysed for their capsular type, antimicrobial resistance and genetic relatedness (multilocus sequence typing, MLST). Results: The colonization rate was 17.8%. Capsular type III was predominant (34.6%), followed by type V (22.4%). The most frequent sequence type (ST) was 19 (23.3%), followed by 23 (18.7%), 1 (16.8%) and 17 (12.1%). Isolates were assembled into three phylogenetic groups from ST-19, ST-23 and ST-17 founders. All isolates were susceptible to penicillin, whereas resistance to erythromycin and clindamycin was recorded in 23.4% and 20.6% of isolates, respectively. Conclusions: In our setting, the GBS colonization rate in postmenopausal women is similar to that reported in others populations studied. The population structure of these isolates is highly diverse and contains different STs. These data can contribute to the future development of a polysaccharide vaccine for preventing GBS infection in older adults. 2024-04-03T10:26:16Z 2024-04-03T10:26:16Z 2016-03 info:eu-repo/semantics/article B. Moltó-García et al. Molecular characterization and antimicrobial susceptibility of hemolytic Streptococcus agalactiae from post-menopausal women. Maturitas 85 (2016) 5–10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.maturitas.2015.11.007 https://hdl.handle.net/10481/90359 10.1016/j.maturitas.2015.11.007 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional Elsevier