How and why do UTIs cause delirium and confusion in older people?
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Many older often people do not drink enough water. This leads to dehydration which makes you more susceptible to UTIs. Infections can cause fluid leakage into tissues which further reduces important fluids like blood. If you go further down the road of dehydration the rest of the fluids in your body start to dry up which is called hypovolemia. This is a form of shock that can cause dizziness, confusion, low blood pressure, etc.
My kid is an EMT and 70% of the patients are old people and this is very common and in most cases the hospital puts them on IV fluids and antibiotics and they come around pretty quickly.
The real answer is that we don’t even know if this is the case. A systematic literature review couldn’t find a strong association between UTI and confusion. So it’s most certainly not a myth but I feel it’s wrong to answer your question, like many have done in this thread, like there’s a easy explanation to this.
[Link to study](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30717706/)
Walked in the nursing home to find my mother having a full blown conversation with one of her deceased friends. Yeah. Nurses said it was her UTI. She gets them all the time and it only exacerbates her dementia. Someday it will become septic and she’ll pass away. She’s 84.
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