Objective:

To determine the associated factors, clinical and microbiological characteristics, and resistance profiles in symptomatic urinary tract infections associated with catheters in the two institutions with a high level of complexity.

Materials and methods:

A case-control study was carried out. All patients with more than 48 hours of hospitalization with urinary catheter insertion were included and all the clinical and microbiological variables of each patient were collected. 446 patients were included, 223 with symptomatic urinary tract infection associated with a catheter. The multivariate analysis was carried out by means of logistic regression.

Results:

A greater proportion of men was evidenced in the controls (60.5%) compared to the cases (51.1%), the median age was very similar for the two study groups. It was evidenced by the multivariate logistic regression analysis that the stay in the ICU (OR 2.176; 95% CI 1.322 - 3.555), more than 10 days of urinary catheter (OR 2.907; 95% CI 1.744 - 4.846) and antibiotic therapy previous (OR 0.060; 95% CI 0.037 - 0.103) were the main factors associated with the occurrence of CA-UTI. No association was found between presenting the event of interest and age, this variable is not related to the presence of intrahospital infections. Co morbidities, which are more frequently present in the elderly, are likely to have outweighed the effect of age in these studies. The association with gender was not identified as a risk factor, which could be expected, since the use of the urinary catheter makes the risk comparable between men and women.

Conclusions:

This study showed that symptomatic urinary tract infections associated with catheters are still a frequent entity in the hospital setting, putting the safety of patients at risk and increasing both morbidity and mortality rates

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