Prevalence of Urinary Tract Infections in Uganda: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Urinary tract infections (UTIs) pose a significant burden on public health, affecting millions of individuals worldwide; on average, a typical Ugandan female will have an infection once a month. Understanding their epidemiology is crucial for targeted interventions. This systematic review and meta-analysis sought to synthesize existing literature on urinary tract infections in Uganda, providing a comprehensive overview of its prevalence. On June 24th, 2023 we searched two bibliographic databases PubMed and Scopus to identify studies conducted in Uganda that reported urinary tract infections. The main concepts related to this research, “urinary tract infections, “prevalence”; “Uganda” were expanded with their variations and combined using Boolean operators (AND, OR) to formulate the final search query. The selection and inclusion of studies followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analysis. This study found the national pooled prevalence of urinary tract infection in Uganda to be 24.92% (95%CI: 23.407 - 26.479; I² = 98.85 [98.56% - 99.08%]) with Northern Uganda having the highest pooled prevalence 71.94% (63.70 - 79.23). The predominant isolates are Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, and Klebsiella pneumoniae. Gram-negative bacteria uropathogens were dominants across most studies except for Odongo et al., 2013: 53.66% (95% CI: [42.30 - 64.75] I²: 93.3% [89.9 - 95.4]) and Calzada et al., 2022: 76.4% (95% CI: [66.22 - 85.76] I²: 93.3% [89.9 - 95.4]) which had Gram-positive bacteria as the dominant bacteria with more female more affected than men. This study found a high pool prevalence of UTIs in Uganda with Northern and Western Uganda having the highest prevalence. Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, and Klebsiella pneumoniae were the common bacteria while a recent study in 2022 reported Gram-positive bacteria as the predominant bacteria. More studies should be done in the Central and Eastern regions of Uganda. Further studies should recruit more males to ascertain the prevalence of UTIs among males as many studies had focused on and recruited more females than males.