Novel Probiotic Treatment for Prevention of Recurrent UTIs in Children

Background:

Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are a common and costly cause of doctor visits for children. Frequent UTIs trigger kidney damage that leads to serious diseases like high blood pressure, pregnancy complications, and kidney failure. Treating UTIs with preventative antibiotics has not shown improvement of the risk of these diseases, and contributes to the growing public health issue of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Bacteria that cause UTIs originate from the bowel. In an effort to reduce the number of UTIs, investigators want to exchange the bacteria living in our bowels for a more harmless variety.

Hypothesis and specific aims:

Investigators hypothesize a probiotic comprised of a probiotic bacteria will change the bowel bacteria, thereby reducing the numbers of infection-causing bacteria, thus reducing frequency of UTIs in healthy patients with recurrent UTIs and those patients with urinary tract problems that require use of catheters to empty their bladders.

Aim 1: Investigators plan to challenge infection-causing bacteria like Pseudomonas species, Enterococcus species, and Klebsiella species to live in the same environment with the probiotic bacteria to see how the numbers of each bacteria change.

Aim 2: Investigators will culture bacteria that live on urinary catheters and then challenge them to live in the same environment as the probiotic bacteria.

Potential Impact:

This novel treatment prevents UTIs by exchanging a patient's bowel bacteria for a harmless bacteria and reduces the use of antibiotics overall in the community.