Future UTI treatments could involve faecal testing to create a tailored treatment plan based on intestinal flora, say University of Queensland researchers after studying one patient’s recurrent infections.

Over five years, they tested urine samples from a 74-year-old US woman with a 45-year history of recurrent UTIs treated with a variety of antibiotics.

Using gene sequencing, they found that all of the samples contained an identical Escherichia coli clone, with some variants resistant to multiple antibiotics.

E.coli from the same lineage was also identified in faecal samples but not in other potential reservoir sites, the researchers reported in Nature Communications.