Longer-duration antibiotic treatment for urinary tract infections (UTIs) in men does not decrease their risk of early or late recurrence, data show.
Dimitri M. Drekonja, MD, MS, of the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Health Care System in Minneapolis, and colleagues identified 39,149 UTI episodes in 33,336 unique patients among 4,854,765 male outpatients in the Veterans Affairs system.
Longer-duration treatment—defined as more than seven days of antibiotics—was not associated with a reduction in early or late recurrence compared with shorter-duration treatment (seven days or fewer), according to findings published online ahead of print in Archives of Internal Medicine. Longer-duration treatment was associated, however, with a significantly increased rate of late recurrence (10.8% vs. 8.4%), which in multivariate analysis translated into a 20% increased risk of late recurrence.
Continue Reading
In addition, longer-duration treatment was associated with a significantly increased risk of Clostridium difficile infection compared shorter-duration treatment (0.5% vs. 0.3%).
The researchers defined early and late recurrence as UTIs that returned in 30 days or less and more than 30 days, respectively.
