Week 5

Compared to the past couple of weeks, this week was more relaxed. Instead of doing more clinical rounds, I focused instead on the data analysis I was conducting for my clinical mentor.

Interestingly, when it comes to UTIs, the infection rate generally varies by gender and by medical history. Women often have a higher infection rate than males especially when it comes to infections of the lower urinary tract. Anatomically this makes sense as they have a shorter urethra than their counterpart. In the upper urinary tract, the medical history can be considered to be more important than the sex. Kidney transplant recipients are often at risk for infections following the transplant surgery. Aside from surgical site infections, they have to worry about different types of kidney and upper urinary tract infections. Those come in different levels of risk. First, we have bacterial infections, then viral infections and fungal infections which are the most difficult to deal with, presenting more risks of complications. The data analysis I'm conducting is focused on UTI infections for Kidney transplant recipients. 

As of now, I found that taking antibiotics following the operation was successful at reducing the occurrence of UTIs. Furthermore, those who took antibiotics designed specifically to prevent UTIs had a lower rate of reinfection than those who didn't. There were more interesting findings for this specific set of data. However, considering that they came from a survey, it would have been more interesting to compare the survey results to the actual urine culture.

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