For women that get recurrent UTIs, water really is the best medicine to prevent the painful infections, a new study reveals.
One in five young women gets frequent bladder infections, and some people are simply more prone to them than others.
Perhaps because they are so common, there are plenty of myths about at-home treatment and prevention of urinary tract infections (UTI): peeing after sex to prevent them, drinking cranberry juice to get rid of them.
You’re not entirely helpless against them at home, though. University of Miami researchers found that staying hydrated can cut the risks of a bladder infection nearly in half.
Women who drank more than six eight-ounce glasses of water a day for a year (dark blue) were far less likely to get a UTI, according to a new University of Miami study
If you’re a woman, odds are you will have a UTI at some point in your life.
An estimated 50-60 percent of women will get at least one painful, burning infection during the course of their lives.
And for many, the first will not be the last.
Urinary tract infections can happen to anyone, but they are much more common among women.
While bladder infections are not sexually transmitted, sex does make them more likely.
UTIs happen when bacteria that don’t belong in the urinary tract find their way into it, and start multiplying.
Typically, the misplaced bacteria originally came from the digestive tract.
Skin-to-skin contact and jostling during sex makes it easier for bacteria – most commonly E. coli – from your digestive tract gets shuffled into your urinary tract.
A long-running theory has advised women to make sure to pee after sex, purportedly to help expel bacteria from the urinary tract.
And to prepare to wash out all that bacteria, the common sense advice has been to drink lots of water.
‘While it’s been widely assumed that increased water intake helps to flush out bacteria and reduce the risk of recurrent UTI, there has been no supporting research data showing such a beneficial effect of water,’ said lead study author Dr Thomas Hooton, an infectious disease professor who specializes in UTIs.
‘We advise people to do things based on logical thinking and biological plausibility, but often we don’t have trials to back it up.’
But the research he and his team carried out and published in JAMA Internal Medicine today changes that.
They studied 140 premenopausal women in Europe, all of whom suffered from recurrent UTIs.
The women were in the habit of drinking less than six eight-ounce glasses of water, suggesting that they might not be sufficiently hydrated.
For the 12 months of the study, the scientists had these women up their water intake so that they were drinking at least those six glasses every day.
They found that those who drank more water were far less likely to get UTIs.
In fact, the less-hydrated women got nearly twice as many bladder infections over the year. They had an average infection frequency of about 3.2, compared to 1.7 for those who drank six or more glasses of water a day.
‘This study provides convincing evidence that increased daily intake of water can reduce frequent UTIs,’ he said.
So far, his working theory is that the old wives’ tale had the right theory all along: ‘The mechanism is presumably via the flushing effect of increased urine volume, but there may be other effects we are not aware of.’
Part of the reason that clinical evidence for the hydration theory has been lacking is financially-motivated, Dr Hooton says.
Research showing that medications like antibiotics work serves to push patients to buy more drugs, and that funnels money into the pockets of pharmaceutical companies.
That can help doctors, too. Cheap or free preventative measures, like water don’t feed into the same monetary loop.
‘So who would make money out of that [research]? You could submit it to the NIH, but it’s unlikely that it would be funded,’ says Dr Hooton.
Danone Research, which sells 11 bottled waters, including Evian, funded his research.
‘But there’s no conclusion in the study that Evian water is the magic here; it’s water,’ he says.
‘There’s no reason to think that tap water wouldn’t be just as efficacious.’
That’s good news for the millions of women worldwide who deal with UTIs routinely.
Currently, many doctors advise those who regularly get UTIs after sex to take an antibiotic right before intercourse.
But that can get expensive, and may even contribute to the development of antibiotic resistance.
Hydrating is far cheaper – and promotes better health in general.
‘This is a trial of the effect of behavioral change on the risk of recurrent UTIs,’ said Dr Hooton.
‘The results are important given the increasing prevalence of antimicrobial resistance and the critical need for antimicrobial-sparing modalities in the management of infectious diseases.’