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Microbiota in 2016

Associating infection and incontinence with the female urinary microbiota

The discovery and confirmation of the female urinary microbiota in 2012 provided opportunities to improve insight into lower urinary tract disorders in women, including UTI and urgency urinary incontinence. Now, research in 2016 has shown that expanded culture techniques enable improved uropathogen detection and confirm that bacteria detected by culture-independent methods are alive.

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Figure 1: Urine is not sterile.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the members of the Loyola Urinary Education and Research Collaborative for their contributions to the work described, in particular Dr Paul Schreckenberger from the Loyola Department of Pathology, for help in putting together this manuscript. A.J.W. and L.B. have been supported by NIH grants 2U10 HD41250, U01 DK58229, R21 DK097435, R56 DK104718, P20 DK108268, R01 DK104718, a translational grant from the Falk Foundation and by RFC LU206998 from Loyola University Chicago. A.J.W. has received funding for an Investigator Initiated Studies VESI-12D01 and MYRB-15A01 from Astellas Scientific and Medical Affairs. Our funding sources have had no role in design or conduct of our studies; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of our data, or in preparation, review, or approval of this or any other manuscript.

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Both authors researched data for article, made substantial contributions to discussions of content, wrote the article, and reviewed and edited the manuscript before submission.

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Correspondence to Linda Brubaker.

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Dr Brubaker has received editorial honoraria from UpToDate. Dr Wolfe has received research support from Astellas Scientific and Medical Affairs for urinary microbiome research. Both authors have received funding from the NIH and Loyola University Chicago for urinary microbiome research.

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Brubaker, L., Wolfe, A. Associating infection and incontinence with the female urinary microbiota. Nat Rev Urol 14, 72–74 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrurol.2016.262

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