- In a new study, researchers say half of women are given the wrong antibiotic for a urinary tract infection.
- Experts say this is done many times because a medication is prescribed before lab results come back.
- Experts urge women who believe they have an infection to insist on a urine culture and wait for results before taking antibiotics.
Nearly half of women treated for urinary tract infections (UTIs) start out and often stay on the wrong antibiotic.
That’s the finding from a recent study out of Washington University in St. Louis published in the journal Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America.
Experts say the research is important for people fighting a urinary tract infection, as well as for antibiotic use overall.
“Antibiotics are serious medicine and need to be used in a thoughtful way,” Dr. Katherine Campbell, MPH, medical director of labor and birth, maternal special care unit at Yale New Haven Hospital in Connecticut, told Healthline.
“We are now in about our third generation of (having antibiotics available), and there are real consequences from antibiotic resistance,” she added.
The recent study was designed to look at the differences in antibiotics prescribed to women in urban areas versus rural areas.
While the study authors anticipated finding more challenges in one area above another, they found that the issue exists across the board.
The researchers noted that nearly half of the 670,450 women in the study received the wrong antibiotic and often were kept on antibiotics too long.
“Given that uncomplicated UTIs are one of the most common indications for antibiotic prescribing in otherwise healthy populations, we wanted to identify targets for interventions designed to improve guideline adherence,” Anne Mobley Butler, PhD, a study author and an assistant professor of medicine and surgery at the Washington University School of Medicine, told Healthline.
“Although we observed differences between rural and urban prescribing, inappropriate prescribing was rampant in both rural and urban settings,” she added.
Women in rural areas were more likely to be on antibiotics for a longer time than needed, but overall, the prescribing issues showed in equal measures across the board.
Why is this important?
It can mean a delay in improvement in symptoms, and this overuse of medication can have long-term impacts.
“We now understand there are a myriad of issues with (incorrect or overdone) antibiotic use,” Dr. Felice Gersh, who treats thousands of women as founder and director of the Integrative Medical Group of Irvine in California, told Healthline. “It disrupts our microbiome.”
Source: healthline