HELP! [Archive] - PinoyExchange

GreekGod

Mar 5, 2001, 10:34 AM

As the name implies, UTI affects the urinary tract. It consists of the various organs of the body that produce, store, and get rid of urine. These include the kidneys, the ureters, the bladder, and the urethra.

Urine is normally sterile -- that is, it does not normally contain bacteria. This is a good thing, since the mineral and sugar content of urine make it a great medium for bacteria to grow in.

How does an infection start?
The urinary tract can be infected from above (by bacteria entering the kidneys from the bloodstream and travelling downward) or from below (by bacteria entering the urethra and travelling upward).

Women :girl: may become prone to UTI's because of anatomical considerations. Since a woman's urethra is shorter than a man's, women are much more likely than men to get UTI's.Sexually active teenage and adult women are more prone to UTI's because of friction at the meatus, which tends to push bacteria into the urethra.

Urethritis is infection/inflammation of the urethra. This can be due to other things besides the organisms usually involved in UTI's; in particular, many sexually-transmitted diseases (STD's) appear initially as urethritis.

Urethritis usually appears as burning on urination. Often this burning occurs mainly when you start urinating, since the bacteria and infected urine in the urethra cause the inflammation but are flushed out when "fresh" urine flows through the urethra on its way out of the bladder.

The biggest problem with a UTI is if it progresses to pyelonephritis. This can result in scarring and damage to the kidney tissue. Although the kidney's filter system is pretty big, it is not infinite. If there is enough damage to the filter system, waste products can't be removed properly. This constitutes kidney failure, and if it is bad enough and long-lasting enough the only solutions are dialysis (filtering your blood through an "artificial kidney" which isn't nearly as good as the real one and requires you to sit hooked up to a lot of plumbing three times a week) or a kidney transplant (which also poses many risks and problems).

A different complication occurs if the pressure-regulation tissues of the kidney are scarred. If this is bad enough, your blood pressure may be kept too low (and you'll faint frequently at the very least) or too high (leading to strokes, heart disease, and other nasty things).

Both of these problems may occur rapidly, but only if the infection is very severe. More often, the damage done by the initial infection, even if it is not compounded by future infections, progresses over many months or years. In particular renal failure may not be complete until long after the first UTI.

:bop:How do we treat UTI?

The first step in treating a UTI is to make sure there really is one. The only certain way to know if there is a UTI is to take a sample of urine and "culture" it: try to grow bacteria from the sample. If there are bacteria, we can then test several antibiotics to see which ones kill the bacteria most efficiently.

The problem here is in getting a good sample of urine for culture. Simply urinating into a sterile cup may not stop contamination by bacteria on the skin, especially with girls. If you can control your urine, it is possible to use a "clean-catch" sample. You get this by cleaning the meatus and the surrounding area thoroughly with antiseptics (such as iodine solution), then urinating a little into the toilet before filling the sample cup, and finishing your urination in the toilet. This flushes out bacteria that may be in the urethra or meatus.

Once we have diagnosed a UTI we start antibiotics. Typical antibiotics used for UTIs include trimethoprim-sulfamethoxamole, nitrofurantoin, and certain penicillins such as amoxicillin. In some cases, when we are pretty sure from the symptoms that you actually have a UTI, we will start antibiotics right after we get the urine culture; if the culture result shows that we need a different antibiotic, we can always change.:smokin:

Sorry, no physician can just prescribe via chat.:bleh: