Are UTIs preventable?
Urinary tract infections (UTIs) account for nearly 7 million health care office visits each year in the U.S., and over 1.5 million visits to an emergency department each year. These infections are often painful but may be preventable. If you’re wondering whether there’s anything you can do to help prevent UTIs, keep reading to learn more.
What can cause a UTI?
Before we dive into how you can prevent UTIs, let’s talk about how you might get a UTI in the first place. Risk factors for a UTI can include:
- Sexual activity: Sexually active women tend to have more UTIs than women who aren’t sexually active. Having a new sexual partner can also increase one’s risk.
- Different types of birth control: Women who use diaphragms or spermicide may be at higher risk for UTIs.
- Menopause: After menopause, a decline in circulating estrogen causes changes in the urinary tract can make you more vulnerable to urinary infections.
- Irregular bowel habits: Frequent or chronic constipation and/or diarrhea can increase your risk for UTIs.
If you’re feeling pain and burning when you pee, you may have a UTI. Other UTI symptoms can include feeling like you constantly need to pee, or only passing small amounts of urine even when you really have to go. Know with confidence whether you have a UTI by testing for UTIs from home using our UTI Tests. When you have your results, we recommend sharing them with your health care provider for diagnosis confirmation and further treatment using antibiotic medicine.
Now that we’ve covered potential causes of UTIs, here’s how you can prevent potential infections in the future.
How can I prevent UTIs?
There are a variety of behaviors and lifestyle changes to help reduce your chances of getting UTIs:
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- Drink plenty of fluids, especially water and cranberry juice. While scientific studies are not conclusive that cranberry juice prevents UTIs, cranberry has proven to be helpful in UTI prevention.
- Make sure to pee right after sex, as well as drink a full glass of water after sex to further flush out bacteria.
- Avoid potentially irritating feminine products. Using deodorant sprays or other feminine products, such as douches or powders, can have negative consequences for your urinary tract and vaginal health overall.
- Take daily vitamin supplements to promote urinary health.
If you’re looking to incorporate an easy-to-use vitamin to help prevent UTIs, our UTI Daily Protection Supplement designed by expert urologists can help make UTIs a thing of the past. Formulated with D-Mannose, cranberry, turmeric, and Vitamin C, our supplement is designed using natural, science-backed methods to help prevent UTIs. While you may be familiar with ingredients like cranberry, turmeric, and Vitamin C, you might be wondering what D-Mannose is and why we included it in our vitamin.
What is D-mannose?
D-Mannose is a kind of sugar related to glucose. It’s found in many fruits and vegetables, including cranberries, apples, oranges, peaches, and broccoli. D-Mannose is also often found in nutritional supplements, as a capsule or powder. Since D-Mannose occurs naturally in many foods, it’s considered to be safe when consumed in appropriate amounts.
D-Mannose has been lauded in recent years as an essential ingredient in preventing certain kinds of bacteria from latching onto the walls of the urinary tract. With D-Mannose present, the bacteria find it hard to attach to cells and cause infection. Since D-Mannose is a newer ingredient being utilized by doctors and patients, studies are still ongoing to test its efficacy.
Studies have also shown that D-Mannose can be helpful for preventing recurrent UTIs if you are prone to chronic UTIs that come back repeatedly.
While research is ongoing, D-Mannose continues to play a role in both the prevention and treatment of UTIs, particularly for those who have frequent UTIs. Does this tiny little glucose have superpowers? We think so.
If you aren't sure if you have a UTI or something else, we recommend this at-home lab test for clear results and treatment!
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