Oral vaccines could provide relief for people who suffer regular UTIs. Here’s how they work
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In a recent TikTok video, Australian media personality Abbie Chatfield shared she was starting a vaccine to protect against urinary tract infections (UTIs).
Huge news for the UTI girlies. I am starting a UTI vaccine tonight for the first time.
Chatfield suffers from recurrent UTIs and has turned to the Uromune vaccine, an emerging option for those seeking relief beyond antibiotics.
But Uromune is not a traditional vaccine injected to your arm. So what is it and how does it work?
First, what are UTIs?
UTIs are caused by bacteria entering the urinary system. This system includes the kidneys, bladder, ureters (thin tubes connecting the kidneys to the bladder), and the urethra (the tube through which urine leaves the body).
The most common culprit is Escherichia coli (E. coli), a type of bacteria normally found in the intestines.
While most types of E. coli are harmless in the gut, it can cause infection if it enters the urinary tract. UTIs are particularly prevalent in women due to their shorter urethras, which make it easier for bacteria to reach the bladder.
Roughly 50% of women will experience at least one UTI in their lifetime, and up to half of those will have a recurrence within six months.
The symptoms of a UTI typically include a burning sensation when you wee, frequent urges to go even when the bladder is empty, cloudy or strong-smelling urine, and pain or discomfort in the lower abdomen or back. If left untreated, a UTI can escalate into a kidney infection, which can require more intensive treatment.
While antibiotics are the go-to treatment for UTIs, the rise of antibiotic resistance and the fact many people experience frequent reinfections has sparked more interest in preventive options, including vaccines.
What is Uromune?
Uromune is a bit different to traditional vaccines that are injected into the muscle. It’s a sublingual spray, which means you spray it under your tongue. Uromune is generally used daily for three months.
It contains inactivated forms of four bacteria that are responsible for most UTIs, including E. coli. By introducing these bacteria in a controlled way, it helps your immune system learn to recognise and fight them off before they cause an infection. It can be classified as an immunotherapy.
A recent study involving 1,104 women found the Uromune vaccine was 91.7% effective at reducing recurrent UTIs after three months, with effectiveness dropping to 57.6% after 12 months.
These results suggest Uromune could provide significant (though time-limited) relief for women dealing with frequent UTIs, however peer-reviewed research remains limited.
Any side effects of Uromune are usually mild and may include dry mouth, slight stomach discomfort, and nausea. These side effects typically go away on their own and very few people stop treatment because of them. In rare cases, some people may experience an allergic reaction.
How can I access it?
In Australia, Uromune has not received full approval from the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), and so it’s not something you can just go and pick up from the pharmacy.
However, Uromune can be accessed via the TGA’s Special Access Scheme or the Authorised Prescriber pathway. This means a GP or specialist can apply for approval to prescribe Uromune for patients with recurrent UTIs. Once the patient has a form from their doctor documenting this approval, they can order the vaccine directly from the manufacturer.
Uromune is not covered under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, meaning patients must cover the full cost out-of-pocket. The cost of a treatment program is around A$320.
Uromune is similarly available through special access programs in places like the United Kingdom and Europe.
Other options in the pipeline
In addition to Uromune, scientists are exploring other promising UTI vaccines.
Uro-Vaxom is an established immunomodulator, a substance that helps regulate or modify the immune system’s response to bacteria. It’s derived from E. coli proteins and has shown success in reducing UTI recurrences in several studies. Uro-Vaxom is typically prescribed as a daily oral capsule taken for 90 days.
FimCH, another vaccine in development, targets something called the adhesin protein that helps E. coli attach to urinary tract cells. FimCH is typically administered through an injection and early clinical trials have shown promising results.
Meanwhile, StroVac, which is already approved in Germany, contains inactivated strains of bacteria such as E. coli and provides protection for up to 12 months, requiring a booster dose after that. This injection works by stimulating the immune system in the bladder, offering temporary protection against recurrent infections.
These vaccines show promise, but challenges like achieving long-term immunity remain. Research is ongoing to improve these options.
No magic bullet, but there’s reason for optimism
While vaccines such as Uromune may not be an accessible or perfect solution for everyone, they offer real hope for people tired of recurring UTIs and endless rounds of antibiotics.
Although the road to long-term relief might still be a bit bumpy, it’s exciting to see innovative treatments like these giving people more options to take control of their health.
Iris Lim, Assistant Professor in Biomedical Science, Bond University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Wasting Your Vitamins?
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Are you flushing away your vitamins?
Most likely…but you don’t have to.
We all know what a wasteful expense supplements can sometimes be, but you can optimise your intake to get more bang for your buck!
Top Tips for Getting Your Money’s Worth:
- Liquids are better than tablets—the body can’t absorb nutrients from tablets anywhere as easily as it can from liquids, with some saying as low as a 50% absorption rate for tablets, so if your supplement can come in drinkable form, take it that way!
- Capsules are better than tablets—capsules, depending on the kind, contain either a powder (true capsules) or a liquid (softgels). Once the capsule/softgel is broken down in the stomach, it releases its contents, which will now be absorbed as though you took it as a drink.
- Stay hydrated—on that note, your body can only make use of nutrients that it can easily transport, and if you’re dehydrated, the process is sluggish! Having a big glass of water with your supplements will go a long way to helping your body get them where they’re needed.
- Take with black pepper—studies disagree on exactly how much black pepper improves absorption of nutrients. Some say it improves it by 50%, others say as much as 7x better. The truth is probably that it varies from one nutrient to the next, but what is (almost) universally accepted is that black pepper helps you absorb many nutrients you take orally.
- Take with a meal—bonus if you seasoned it with black pepper! But also: many nutrients are best absorbed alongside food, and many are specifically fat-soluble (so you want to take a little fat around the same time for maximum absorption)
- Consider split doses—a lot of nutrients are best absorbed when spread out a bit. Why? Your body can often only absorb so much at once, and what it couldn’t absorb can, depending on the nutrient, pass right through you. So better to space out the doses—breakfast and dinner make for great times to take them.
- Consider cycling—no, not the two-wheeled kind, though feel free to do that too! What cycling means when it comes to supplements is to understand that your body can build a tolerance to some supplements, so you’ll get gradually less effect for the same dose. Combat this by scheduling a break—five days on, two days off is a common schedule—allowing your body to optimise itself in the process!
- Check Medications—and, as is always safe, make sure you check whether any medications you take can interrupt your supplement absorption!
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Red-dy For Anything Polyphenol Salad
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So, you’ve enjoyed your Supergreen Superfood Salad Slaw, and now you’re ready for another slice of the rainbow. Pigments in food aren’t just for decoration—they each contain unique benefits! Today’s focus is on some red foods that, combined, make a deliciously refreshing salad that’s great for the gut, heart, and brain.
You will need
- 1 cup crème fraîche or sour cream (if vegan, use our Plant-Based Healthy Cream Cheese recipe, and add the juice of 1 lime)
- ½ small red cabbage, thinly sliced
- 1 red apple, cored and finely chopped
- 1 red onion, thinly sliced
- 10 oz red seedless grapes, halved
- 10 oz red pomegranate seeds
- 1 tsp red chili flakes
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Combine all the red ingredients in a big bowl.
2) Add the crème fraîche and mix gently but thoroughly.
3) If you have time, let it sit in the fridge for 48 hours before enjoying, as its colors will intensify and its polyphenols will become more bioavailable. But if you want/need, you can serve immediately; that’s fine too.
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Resveratrol & Healthy Aging
- Tasty Polyphenols For Your Heart And Brain
- Pomegranate vs Cherries – Which is Healthier?
- Capsaicin For Weight Loss And Against Inflammation
Take care!
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The Lymphatic System Against Cancer & More
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Ask Not What Your Lymphatic System Can Do For You…
Just kidding; we’ll cover that first, as it’s definitely not talked about enough.
The lymphatic system is the system in the body that moves lymph around. It’s made of glands, nodes, and vessels:
- The glands (such as the tonsils and the adenoids) and nodes filter out bacteria and produce white blood cells. Specific functions may be, well, specialized—beyond the scope of today’s article—but that’s the broad function.
- The vessels are the tubes that allow those things to be moved around, suspended in lymph.
What’s lymph? It’s a colorless water-like liquid that transports immune cells, nutrients (and waste) around the body (through the lymphatic system).
Yes, it works alongside your vasculature; when white blood cells aren’t being deployed en masse into your bloodstream to deal with some threat, they’re waiting in the wings in the lymphatic system.
While your blood is pumped around by your heart, lymph moves based on a variety of factors, including contractions of small specialized lymphatic muscles, the pressure gradient created by the combination of those and gravity, and the movements of your body itself.
Here’s a larger article than we have room for, with diagrams we also don’t have room for:
Modelling the lymphatic system
To oversimplify it in few words for the sake of moving on: you can most of the time: think of it as an ancillary network supporting your circulatory system that unlike blood, doesn’t deal with oxygen or sugars, but does deal with a lot of other things, including:
- water and salt balance
- immune cells and other aspects of immune function
- transports fats (and any fat-soluble vitamins in them) into circulation
- cleans up stuff that gets stuck between cells
- general detoxification
There’s a lot that can go wrong if lymph isn’t flowing as it should
Too much to list here, but to give an idea:
- Arthritis and many autoimmune diseases
- Cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome
- Obesity, diabetes, and organ failure
- Alzheimer’s and other dementias
- Lymphadenitis, lymphangitis, and lymphedenopathy
- Lymphomas and Hodgkin’s disease (both are types of lymphatic cancer)
- Cancers of other kinds, because of things not being cleaned up where and when they should be
Yikes! That’s a lot of important things for a mostly-forgotten system to be taking care of protecting us from!
What you can do for your lymphatic system, to avoid those things!
Happily, there are easy things we can do to give our lymph some love, such as:
Massage therapy (and foam rolling)
This is the go-to that many people/publications recommend. It’s good! It’s certainly not the most important thing to do, but it’s good.
You can even use a simple gadget like this one to help move the lymph around, without needing to learn arcane massage techniques.
Exercise (move your body!)
This is a lot more important. The more we move our body, the more lymph moves around. The more lymph moves around today, the more easily it will move around tomorrow. A healthy constant movement of lymph throughout the lymphatic system is key to keeping everything running smoothly.
If you pick only one kind of exercise, make it High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT):
How To Do HIIT (Without Wrecking Your Body)
If for some reason you really can’t do that, just spend as much of your waking time as reasonably possible, moving, per:
For ideas on how to do that, check out…
Get thee to a kitchen
This is about getting healthy food that gives your body’s clean-up crew (the lymphatic system) an easier time of it.
Rather than trying to “eat clean” which can be a very nebulous term and it’s often not at all clear (and/or hotly debated) what counts as “clean”, instead, stick to foods that constitute an anti-inflammatory diet:
Take care!
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Related Posts
Sciatica Exercises & Home Treatment – by Dr. George Best
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Dr. Best is a doctor of chiropractic, but his work here is compelling. He starts by giving an overview of the relevant anatomy, and then the assorted possible causes of sciatica, before moving on to the treatments.
As is generally the case for chiropractic, nothing here will be “cured”, but it will give methods for ongoing management to keep you pain-free—which in the case of sciatica, is usually the single biggest thing that most people suffering from it most dearly want.
We get to read a lot about self-massage and exercises, of the (very well-evidenced; about the most well-evidenced thing there is for back pain) McKenzie technique exercises, as well as assorted acupressure-based techniques that are less well-evidenced but have good anecdotal support.
He also writes about preventing sciatica—which if you already have it, that doesn’t mean it’s too late; it just means, in that case do these things (along with the aforementioned exercises) to gradually reverse the harm done and get back to where you were pre-sciatica.
Lastly, he does also speak on when signs might point to your problems being beyond the scope of this book, and seeking professional examination if you haven’t already.
The style throughout is straight to the point, informative, and instructional. There is zero fluff or padding, and no sensationalization. There are diagrams and illustrative photos where appropriate.
Bottom line: if you have, or fear the threat of, sciatica, then this is an excellent book to have and use its exercises.
Click here to check out Sciatica Exercises & Home Treatment, and live pain-free!
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What You Don’t Know Can Kill You
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Knowledge Is Power!
This is Dr. Simran Malhotra. She’s triple board-certified (in lifestyle medicine, internal medicine, and palliative care), and is also a health and wellness coach.
What does she want us to know?
Three things:
Wellness starts with your mindset
Dr. Malhotra shifted her priorities a lot during the initial and perhaps most chaotic phase of the COVID pandemic:
❝My husband, a critical care physician, was consumed in the trenches of caring for COVID patients in the ICU. I found myself knee-deep in virtual meetings with families whose loved ones were dying of severe COVID-related illnesses. Between the two of us, we saw more trauma, suffering, and death, than we could have imagined.
The COVID-19 pandemic opened my eyes to how quickly life can change our plans and reinforced the importance of being mindful of each day. Harnessing the power to make informed decisions is important, but perhaps even more important is focusing on what is in our control and taking action, even if it is the tiniest step in the direction we want to go!❞
~ Dr. Simran Malhotra
We can only make informed decisions if we have good information. That’s one of the reasons we try to share as much information as we can each day at 10almonds! But a lot will always depend on personalized information.
There are one-off (and sometimes potentially life-saving) things like health genomics:
The Real Benefit Of Genetic Testing
…but also smaller things that are informative on an ongoing basis, such as keeping track of your weight, your blood pressure, your hormones, and other metrics. You can even get fancy:
Track Your Blood Sugars For Better Personalized Health
Lifestyle is medicine
It’s often said that “food is medicine”. But also, movement is medicine. Sleep is medicine. In short, your lifestyle is the most powerful medicine that has ever existed.
Lifestyle encompasses very many things, but fortunately, there’s an “80:20 rule” in play that simplifies it a lot because if you take care of the top few things, the rest will tend to look after themselves:
These Top Few Things Make The Biggest Difference To Overall Health
Gratitude is better than fear
If we receive an unfavorable diagnosis (and let’s face it, most diagnoses are unfavorable), it might not seem like something to be grateful for.
But it is, insofar as it allows us to then take action! The information itself is what gives us our best chance of staying safe. And if that’s not possible e.g. in the worst case scenario, a terminal diagnosis, (bearing in mind that one of Dr. Malhotra’s three board certifications is in palliative care, so she sees this a lot), it at least gives us the information that allows us to make the best use of whatever remains to us.
See also: Managing Your Mortality
Which is very important!
…and/but possibly not the cheeriest note on which to end, so when you’ve read that, let’s finish today’s main feature on a happier kind of gratitude:
How To Get Your Brain On A More Positive Track (Without Toxic Positivity)
Want to hear more from Dr. Malhotra?
Showing how serious she is about how our genes do not determine our destiny and knowledge is power, here she talks about her “previvor’s journey”, as she puts it, with regard to why she decided to have preventative cancer surgery in light of discovering her BRCA1 genetic mutation:
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Take care!
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Does intermittent fasting increase or decrease our risk of cancer?
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Research over the years has suggested intermittent fasting has the potential to improve our health and reduce the likelihood of developing cancer.
So what should we make of a new study in mice suggesting fasting increases the risk of cancer?
Stock-Asso/Shutterstock What is intermittent fasting?
Intermittent fasting means switching between times of eating and not eating. Unlike traditional diets that focus on what to eat, this approach focuses on when to eat.
There are lots of commonly used intermittent fasting schedules. The 16/8 plan means you only eat within an eight-hour window, then fast for the remaining 16 hours. Another popular option is the 5:2 diet, where you eat normally for five days then restrict calories for two days.
In Australia, poor diet contributes to 7% of all cases of disease, including coronary heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and cancers of the bowel and lung. Globally, poor diet is linked to 22% of deaths in adults over the age of 25.
Intermittent fasting has gained a lot of attention in recent years for its potential health benefits. Fasting influences metabolism, which is how your body processes food and energy. It can affect how the body absorbs nutrients from food and burns energy from sugar and fat.
What did the new study find?
The new study, published in Nature, found when mice ate again after fasting, their gut stem cells, which help repair the intestine, became more active. The stem cells were better at regenerating compared with those of mice who were either totally fasting or eating normally.
This suggests the body might be better at healing itself when eating after fasting.
However, this could also have a downside. If there are genetic mutations present, the burst of stem cell-driven regeneration after eating again might make it easier for cancer to develop.
Polyamines – small molecules important for cell growth – drive this regeneration after refeeding. These polyamines can be produced by the body, influenced by diet, or come from gut bacteria.
The findings suggest that while fasting and refeeding can improve stem cell function and regeneration, there might be a tradeoff with an increased risk of cancer, especially if fasting and refeeding cycles are repeated over time.
While this has been shown in mice, the link between intermittent fasting and cancer risk in humans is more complicated and not yet fully understood.
What has other research found?
Studies in animals have found intermittent fasting can help with weight loss, improve blood pressure and blood sugar levels, and subsequently reduce the risks of diabetes and heart disease.
Research in humans suggests intermittent fasting can reduce body weight, improve metabolic health, reduce inflammation, and enhance cellular repair processes, which remove damaged cells that could potentially turn cancerous.
However, other studies warn that the benefits of intermittent fasting are the same as what can be achieved through calorie restriction, and that there isn’t enough evidence to confirm it reduces cancer risk in humans.
What about in people with cancer?
In studies of people who have cancer, fasting has been reported to protect against the side effects of chemotherapy and improve the effectiveness of cancer treatments, while decreasing damage to healthy cells.
Prolonged fasting in some patients who have cancer has been shown to be safe and may potentially be able to decrease tumour growth.
On the other hand, some experts advise caution. Studies in mice show intermittent fasting could weaken the immune system and make the body less able to fight infection, potentially leading to worse health outcomes in people who are unwell. However, there is currently no evidence that fasting increases the risk of bacterial infections in humans.
So is it OK to try intermittent fasting?
The current view on intermittent fasting is that it can be beneficial, but experts agree more research is needed. Short-term benefits such as weight loss and better overall health are well supported. But we don’t fully understand the long-term effects, especially when it comes to cancer risk and other immune-related issues.
Since there are many different methods of intermittent fasting and people react to them differently, it’s hard to give advice that works for everyone. And because most people who participated in the studies were overweight, or had diabetes or other health problems, we don’t know how the results apply to the broader population.
For healthy people, intermittent fasting is generally considered safe. But it’s not suitable for everyone, particularly those with certain medical conditions, pregnant or breastfeeding women, and people with a history of eating disorders. So consult your health-care provider before starting any fasting program.
Amali Cooray, PhD Candidate in Genetic Engineering and Cancer, WEHI (Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research)
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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