Cranberries for preventing urinary tract infections
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Cranberries have been used widely for several decades for the prevention and treatment of urinary tract infections (UTIs). This is the third update of our review first published in 1998 and updated in 2004 and 2008. To assess the effectiveness of ...

The last sentence in the ‘Plain Language summary’ says “Cranberry products (such as tablets or capsules) were also ineffective (although had the same effect as taking antibiotics), possibly due to lack of potency of the ‘active ingredient’.” …What?

How could they have the same effect as antibiotics and be ineffective at the same time? Is this suggesting antibiotics are ineffective against UTIs? Aren’t antibiotics used to treat UTIs to begin with?

If someone could explain any or all of that to me, I would appreciate it greatly. My girlfriend just got a UTI and is very scared. I found this article, but it seems to contradict itself in a few places, to me. I’m not a scientist, so I recognize that I might just not be able to comprehend it, and would love some clarification!

If you got this far, I’m also wondering how these studies could be considered accurate if a lot of the subjects stopped taking the cranberry products?

TL; DR is the first two sections at the top👆

  • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    3 months ago

    Focus on the RRs and CIs (Relative Risk and Confidence Intervals)—for example: “cranberry products did not significantly reduce the occurrence of symptomatic UTI overall (RR 0.86, 95% CI 0.71 to 1.04)”.

    A relative risk lower than 1.0 suggests a reduced risk, while the 95% confidence interval is the range that the real value probably falls within, accounting for potential sampling error, study size, etc.

    So an RR of 0.86 suggests that cranberry probably reduces the risk of UTI, but the top of the CI being above 1.0 means the study can’t rule out the chance that cranberry actually increases the risk. It’s that last part that presumably leads them to say that cranberry didn’t reduce the risk significantly.