Does a urinary tract infection cause vulvar itching?

After a urinary tract infection occurs, you will occasionally feel itching in your vulva, but the itching is not very obvious. During this period, you should receive formal treatment and do not let your condition turn into a chronic urinary tract infection, otherwise it will induce various complications. If symptoms of chronic urinary tract infection appear, treatment will become more difficult, or even impossible to completely cure.

Upper urinary tract infection[1] mainly refers to pyelonephritis, which can be divided into acute pyelonephritis and chronic pyelonephritis.

Acute pyelonephritis mostly occurs in women of childbearing age. Patients often have low back pain, tenderness and percussion pain in the kidney area, accompanied by systemic symptoms such as chills, fever, headache, nausea and vomiting, as well as bladder irritation signs such as frequent urination, urgency and pain when urinating. Blood tests may show an increase in white blood cells. There is generally no hypertension or azotemia. The patient's urine is turbid and may have gross hematuria. Urinalysis shows a large number of white blood cells or pus cells, a small number of red blood cells and casts, and a small to moderate amount of protein. In addition, morning midstream urine culture and urine smear can help confirm the diagnosis.

Chronic pyelonephritis is mostly caused by untimely and incomplete treatment of acute pyelonephritis. In the past, it was generally believed that a disease course of more than 6 months was considered chronic. If pyelonephritis is caused by urinary tract obstruction, and the inducing factors are not corrected or eliminated in time, the inflammation will not subside for a long time and may gradually become chronic, eventually leading to uremia. Some patients have no obvious symptoms in the acute phase and the disease has become chronic when discovered. Patients with chronic pyelonephritis do not have obvious urinary tract irritation symptoms, have a long history of illness, and often have systemic symptoms such as irregular fever, backache, waist pain, fatigue, weight loss, and progressive anemia.

Because renal tubular damage is more severe and occurs earlier than glomerular damage, symptoms of tubular dysfunction often appear, such as polyuria, nocturia, low urine specific gravity, and renal tubular acidosis. Some patients (mostly young and middle-aged people) often develop malignant hypertension rapidly due to lesions involving the renal blood vessels, and experience early cardiac and renal function damage and retinal vascular changes.

In chronic pyelonephritis, except for the acute attack period, the changes in urine routine are not as obvious as those in the acute case. Pyuria often occurs intermittently and requires repeated examinations. It can be found that there are often a small amount of pus cells and red blood cells, as well as a small amount of protein. For untreated chronic pyelonephritis, regardless of whether there is sterile urine or not, the 3-hour white blood cell excretion rate is often above 100,000/hour, which has diagnostic value. Intravenous pyelography is extremely valuable in diagnosing chronic pyelonephritis.