Women who get recurrent urinary tract infections may be caught in a vicious cycle in which antibiotics given to eradicate one infection predispose them to develop another, by disrupting microbiome, a new study suggests.
The urinary tract infections are caused by bacteria in the urinary tract and characterized by frequent and painful urination.
A round of antibiotics usually clears up the symptoms, but the relief is often temporary: a quarter of women go on to develop a second urinary tract infection (UTI) within six months.
Some unfortunate individuals get UTIs over and over, and require antibiotics every few months.
The new study, by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, showed that a round of antibiotics eliminates disease-causing bacteria from the bladder but not from the intestines.
Surviving bacteria in the gut can multiply and spread to the bladder again, causing another UTI.
At the same time, repeated cycles of antibiotics wreak havoc on the community of helpful bacteria that normally live in the intestines, the so-called gut microbiome.
Similar to other disorders in which gut microbes and the immune system are linked, women with recurrent UTIs in the study had less diverse microbiomes that were deficient in an important group of bacteria that helps regulate inflammation, and a distinct immunological signature in their blood indicative of inflammation.
The study is published May 2 in Nature Microbiology.
“It’s frustrating for women who are coming in to the doctor with recurrence after recurrence after recurrence, and the doctor, who’s typically male, gives them advice about hygiene,” said co-senior author Scott J. Hultgren, PhD, the Helen L. Stoever Professor of Molecular Microbiology at Washington University.
“That’s not necessarily what the problem is. It’s not necessarily poor hygiene that’s causing this.
The problem lies in the disease itself, in this connection between the gut and the bladder and levels of inflammation. Basically, physicians don’t know what to do with recurrent UTI.
All they have is antibiotics, so they throw more antibiotics at the problem, which probably just makes things worse.”
Most UTIs are caused by Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria from the intestines that get into the urinary tract.
To understand why some women get infection after infection and others get one or none, Hultgren teamed up with Broad Institute scientists Ashlee Earl, PhD, the senior group leader for the Bacterial Genomics Group at Broad and the paper’s co-senior author, and Colin Worby, PhD, a computational biologist and the paper’s lead author.
The researchers studied 15 women with histories of recurrent UTIs and 16 women without.
All participants provided urine and blood samples at the start of the study and monthly stool samples.
The team analyzed the bacterial composition in the stool samples, tested the urine for the presence of bacteria, and measured gene expression in blood samples.
Over the course of a year, 24 UTIs occurred, all in participants with histories of repeated UTIs.
When participants were diagnosed with a UTI, the team took additional urine, blood and stool samples.
The difference between the women who got repeated UTIs and those who didn’t, surprisingly, didn’t come down to the kind of E. coli in their intestines or even the presence of E. coli in their bladders.
Both groups carried E. coli strains in their guts capable of causing UTIs, and such strains occasionally spread to their bladders.
The real difference was in the makeup of their gut microbiomes.
Patients with repeat infections showed decreased diversity of healthy gut microbial species, which could provide more opportunities for disease-causing species to gain a foothold and multiply.
Notably, the microbiomes of women with recurrent UTIs were particularly scarce in bacteria that produce butyrate, a short-chain fatty acid with anti-inflammatory effects.
“We think that women in the control group were able to clear the bacteria from their bladders before they caused disease, and women with recurrent UTI were not, because of a distinct immune response to bacterial invasion of the bladder potentially mediated by the gut microbiome,” Worby said.
The findings highlight the importance of finding alternatives to antibiotics for treating UTIs.
“Our study clearly demonstrates that antibiotics do not prevent future infections or clear UTI-causing strains from the gut, and they may even make recurrence more likely by keeping the microbiome in a disrupted state,” Worby said
Hultgren has long worked on finding innovative therapies to eradicate disease-causing strains of E. coli from the body while sparing the rest of the bacterial community.
His research forms the basis of an experimental drug based on the sugar mannoside and an investigational vaccine, both of which are being tested in people.
Another strategy would be to rebalance the microbiome through fecal transplants, probiotic foods or other means.
Previous studies have identified that commonly used non-antimicrobial drugs (NAMD) play a significant role in antibiotic resistance because of the consequential effect on gut microbiome bacterial composition.
The aim of onu of these researches was to address the role of NAMD use as a risk factor for infection with antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
The researchers from Tel Aviv Medical Center hospital, Israel, examined data from 1,807 patients diagnosed with upper urinary tract infection, and a positive urine or blood culture of Enterobacteriaceae, who were admitted in the hospital over a period of >2 years (from 1st January 2017 to 18th April 2019).
The researchers then acquired the electronic medical records regarding the previous and current use of 19 NAMDs.
The results showed that antimicrobial drug-resistant organisms were found in over half of the collected patient samples.
Furthermore, approximately one-quarter of samples revealed multi-drug-resistant organisms that were resistant to three or more antibiotic classes.
Interestingly, NAMDs such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors for depression symptoms, antipsychotics drugs for mental health, proton pump inhibitors for the reduction of stomach acid, ß-blockers for conditions associated with heart problems, and antimetabolites for the treatment of cancer and other inflammatory diseases were all linked to increased antibiotic resistance.
Additionally, antimetabolites emerged as the group of drugs with the highest influence on antibiotic resistance.
“Our findings highlight the importance of non-antimicrobial drug exposure as a risk factor for antibiotic resistance,” stated lead author Meital Elbaz, Tel Aviv Medical Center.
See also
Antibiotic Resistance Could Be Caused by Commonly Prescribed Classes of Drugs (2021-08-20)
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For more information
Nature microbiology
Longitudinal multi-omics analyses link gut microbiome dysbiosis with recurrent urinary tract infections in women
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Decoy molecules target E. coli to treat UTI in mice
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Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis
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MDN
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