Dr. Christian Moro on cranberry products and liquid therapies and UTI prevention

In this video, Christian Moro, PhD, BSc, BEd, MBus, SFHEA, shares notable findings from the European Urology Focus paper, “Cranberry Juice, Cranberry Tablets, or Liquid Therapies for Urinary Tract Infection: A Systematic Review and Network Meta-analysis.” Moro is associate dean of External Engagement and an associate professor of Biomedical Sciences and Medicine within the Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine at Bond University, Gold Coast, Australia.

Transcription:

What were some of the notable findings? Were any of them surprising to you and your coauthors?

There's a range of studies doing something along these lines, and there were about 20 clinical trials that we could use. There were a lot of other studies that just weren't done as randomized, and some were just hypothetical or single-case studies. We ended up with 3091 participants overall, and 3 trends came out that were significant. The first was that people that had increased fluids, so just drinking more water, did have a reduced prevalence of UTIs. Now, people that were taking cranberry compounds, so just cranberry tablets or tablets that had cranberry compounds in them, also had slight benefits, but the best was mixing them together, so cranberry compounds and tablets with increased fluid or cranberry juice, and we found that was about a 54% lowered rate of UTI. The second, then, was reduction of antibiotic use. Cranberry juice and cranberry won't treat a UTI, but we're looking at, rather than treatments, does it reduce your reliance on antibiotics? Can it reduce the infection rates? We found that the cranberry juice lowered the necessity of using antibiotics by about 59%. Increased fluids was also helpful at about 25% but not as good as cranberry compounds with increased fluid. Cranberry compounds, by themselves, didn't have any effect on antibiotic use, so perhaps there's something in the increasing the fluid seems to be a big thing there, but then adding the cranberry compounds also helps. The last, then, was symptoms of UTI. Taking cranberry compounds in any form—liquid or tablet—reduces the symptoms of UTIs by 5 times. But once again, the symptoms of UTIs was the one where we sort of had the lowest confidence in the evidence, because there are different ways of collecting that data in different studies. But either way, there's definitely some sort of benefit there, at least trending toward that benefit in reducing the symptoms of UTIs.

This transcription was edited for clarity.