Women Share Struggles With Long-Lasting Urinary Infections

Adrianne has lived with a chronic urinary tract infection (UTI, an infection in the body's urinary system) for nearly five years, according to BBC News. She is 29 years old and works in digital marketing in London. She has roughly 8,000 followers on TikTok.

Her condition began as one UTI in 2022. It later became a chronic UTI, which means an infection that keeps causing symptoms. A chronic UTI has no official medical definition, but it is generally described as an infection with persistent symptoms even after a standard course of antibiotics (medicines that fight infection).

Getting a diagnosis took Adrianne two years. At one point, she was wrongly told that she had colon cancer or Crohn's disease, a condition affecting the bowel. She felt dismissed by doctors during this time. She was eventually diagnosed privately with a chronic UTI.

Laura Von Müllen is 26 years old and has also been diagnosed with a chronic UTI. She works remotely from Kent doing social media management. Laura also experiences heart palpitations (a fast or uneven heartbeat) and panic attacks.

Experts estimate that up to 1.7 million women in the UK could be affected by chronic UTIs. Men and children are also affected by UTIs, according to BBC News.

Professor Chris Harding explained that sending a urine sample to the lab is the gold standard (the best available method) for diagnosing a UTI. He added that false negatives, where a test wrongly shows no infection, can often occur when testing for UTIs.

Magda Kujawa said that chronic UTIs overlap significantly with painful bladder syndrome, chronic pelvic pain and endometriosis, a condition where tissue similar to the womb's lining grows outside it. Professor Harding and Kujawa warned that social media can contain misinformation and harmful advice. Kujawa said some women on social media sat in baths of disinfectant, which made their condition worse.