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Staying Healthy
Can we prevent urinary tract infections?
- By Heidi Godman, Executive Editor, Harvard Health Letter
These are the steps to take when you’re trying to ward off UTIs.
If you haven’t experienced a urinary tract infection (UTI) before, take note: while the infections are uncommon in older men, they can be common in older women, occurring in 10% of women ages 65 or older, and in 30% of women ages 85 or older. For up to a third of women who have a UTI, the infection comes back within six months.
"E. coli bacteria [which live in the intestines] cause approximately 80% of all recurrent UTIs and continue generating microbe strains that are resistant to antibiotics. The ability of the bacteria to stick to the urinary tract can sometimes make them very difficult to eliminate," says Edward Doherty, who spent 10 years working on potential vaccines for recurrent UTI and other conditions at Harvard’s Wyss Institute and is now CEO and co-founder of vaccine maker Attivare Therapeutics.
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