Urine Test Maybe not Necessary to Identify UTI

When patients are suspected as a potential penitent of UTI whose full name is urinary tract infection, they are often requested to do urine test so that the doctor can confirm the presence of bacteria. However, new research suggests this test may be unnecessary.

 

Study found that about one-quarter of women who had signs of UTI, which means they are suffering from the problem of burning when urinating or of frequent and urgent urination, had no bacteria in their urine or in their bladders. And although a variety of different bacteria could be found in a number of urine culture tests, only e.coli could be found in both the urine test and the bladder. UTI is common bacterial infections , taking up about 9 million UTI cases in the United States every year, according to the study.

 

"Our study provides further evidence that midstream urine cultures don't routinely need to be done. Most labs don't quantify low enough unless you specifically ask them to. Most women are treated right away for symptoms anyway, because the urine culture doesn't come back for two days," explained the study's lead author, Dr. Thomas Hooton, a professor of medicine at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine in Florida.

 

These findings indicate that urine test may not be accurate enough to find out very small quantities of bacteria in the bladder and it needs to be refined if it continues to be used in clinical practice. The symptoms may not be caused by infections in the bladder, but by an infection in the urethra. Or, inflammation in the urethra may lead to the symptoms, rather than bacteria.

 

If your physician decides to treat you without asking for a urine sample to culture, that's reasonable, said the author of an accompanying journal editorial, Dr. Michael Donnenberg, a professor of medicine, microbiology and immunology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore. But Donnenberg noted that this study raises a number of questions, too: "Do bacteria in the urethra cause symptoms? And, if they do, does treating them make the symptoms go away more quickly? A short course of antibiotics is likely to be effective, and that it's important to keep studying urinary tract infections and we need to know more about exactly what causes symptoms." he said, 

 

Both experts said that more researches are needed when antibiotics can work on the UTI and when they're not to reduce potentially unnecessary antibiotic use because of the concerns about growing antibiotic resistance. Experts also noted that antibiotics are not the only medicine that can help to treat UTI, and there are other medicines such as the diuretic and Diuretic and Anti-inflammation Pill can work on it effectively without worrying about the drug resistance.