Staphylococcus aureus is an important cause of nosocomial and communityassociatedinfections in every region of the world. Clindamycin is one of the alternativeagents used to treat S. aureus infections and accurate identification of CL resistance isimportant to prevent therapeutic failure. Unfortunately, inducible CL resistance is notdetected by standard susceptibility tests. The aim of the present study was to detect theprevalence of inducible CL resistance among clinical isolates of S. aureus and todetermine the susceptibility pattern of iMLSв S. aureus isolates to various antimicrobials.Different clinical samples were collected from 310 patients suffering from variousbacterial infections. Different specimens were cultured and the isolates were identified byconventional microbiological methods. Antibiotic susceptibility testing was performed byKirby-Bauer disk diffusion method and inducible CL resistance was determined by usingthe double-disk diffusion method (CL induction or D-zone test). One hundred clinicalisolates of S. aureus (78 MRSA and 22 MSSA) were recovered. Inducible CL resistancewas detected in 17% of the isolates (11% D and 6% D+), whereas constitutive resistance,negative and susceptible phenotypes were detected in 32%, 12% and 39% of the isolatesrespectively. Moreover, the constitutive resistance phenotype predominated amongMRSA isolates (37.2%) while most of the MSSA isolates (63.6%) showed the susceptiblephenotype. All iMLSв isolates were susceptible to vancomycin and linezolid and it wasfound that the inducible resistance phenotype was more susceptible to augmentin,cefoperazone, gentamycin and ciprofloxacin than was the constitutive resistancephenotype. It was concluded that without the D-zone test, S. aureus isolates withinducible CL resistance may be misclassified as CL susceptible, resulting inunderestimation of CL resistance rate.