Double genitourinary infection cured with medical ozonetherapy: a case report

Background

Urinary tract infections (UTIs) that keep coming back despite repeated courses of antibiotics are a common and frustrating problem, particularly in women. Recurrent, resistant bacterial infections can also coincide with other genitourinary findings, including infection with human papillomavirus (HPV), a virus linked to cervical changes. A 2015 case report published in the Revista Espanola de Ozonoterapia (Spanish Journal of Ozone Therapy) described a patient with both problems at once, and explored whether ozone therapy could help where antibiotics had not.

Study design

This was a single case report - a detailed account of one patient, not a trial across many participants. The patient was a 44-year-old woman with a long history of bacterial urinary tract infections that had not responded to multiple courses of antimicrobial (antibiotic) treatment. Cervical smear testing also showed a positive high-risk HPV DNA result, with no visible lesions present at the time.

The treating clinician used a combined ozone therapy protocol: bladder irrigation with ozonated water, weekly vaginal ozone insufflations together with twice-daily application of ozonated oil over a 15-week period, and a course of major autohaemotherapy (in which a sample of the patient's own blood is treated with ozone gas and then reinfused) delivered weekly over 20 sessions.

Findings

The patient's dysuria (painful urination) resolved after the initial bladder irrigations. At four-month follow-up, she remained free of urinary symptoms, with a normal urinalysis and no further bladder infections recorded. Her HPV DNA test, which had initially been positive, returned a negative result at follow-up.

What the authors concluded

The author concluded that ozone's bactericidal (bacteria-killing), virucidal (virus-inactivating) and anti-inflammatory properties may explain the resolution of both the antibiotic-resistant infection and the HPV finding in this patient. He suggested that ozone therapy could be a useful option for genitourinary infections that do not respond to standard antibiotic treatment, and noted the case as evidence supporting further exploration of ozone's antiviral effects.

Limitations of this study

This is a single case report describing one patient treated by one clinician, so no conclusions can be drawn about how ozone therapy would perform across a wider population, and there was no comparison or control group to rule out spontaneous resolution or other contributing factors. The author himself noted that a longer follow-up period would be needed to confirm whether the improvement was lasting. HPV infection can also clear naturally over time in many people, which makes it difficult to attribute the negative HPV result to the ozone treatment alone. As with all single-patient case reports, these findings should be treated as a starting hypothesis for further research rather than proof that ozone therapy resolves genitourinary infections or HPV.