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Urinary tract infections are treated with antibiotics. Your child should start to feel better after a day or two of taking antibiotics.

It's important to make sure your child takes the antibiotics for as long as your doctor recommends. Otherwise, there's a risk that your child will get another urinary tract infection. Some children get other problems from having a urinary tract infection, as they get older.

Children are especially likely to get another urinary tract infection if they get their first infection before they are 1 year old. The research shows that:¹

• About 8 in 10 girls and 7 in 10 boys get an infection before they are 1 year old get another one.
• About 4 in 10 girls and boys who get an infection after they are 1 year old get another infection.

Urinary tract infections can sometimes scar the kidneys. Between 5 in 100 and 15 in 100 children get kidney scarring within one or two years of their first infection.² Certain things seem to increase your child's risk of kidney scarring. These include:

• Having more infections. The more infections your child has, the greater their risk of scarring³
• Having infections that involve the kidneys (pyelonephritis) rather than infections of the bladder or ureters (the tubes going from the kidneys to the bladder)⁴
• Having an abnormality in the urinary tract that causes urine to flow back to their kidneys (a problem called reflux).⁵ Reflux often goes away by itself after a while. More than a third of the children in one study no longer had reflux four years later.⁶ In another study, 4 in 10 children had grown out of their reflux within one year.⁷

Scarring seems to be more likely to happen in younger children (under two), and becomes less of a problem in children who get urinary tract infections when they are older.^{8 9}

Kidneys that are damaged by infections might not grow well and work as they should. As they get older, children who have scarred kidneys are more likely to have kidney infections and other problems, such as high blood pressure.¹⁰ For this reason, it's important that your child is examined after an infection to check for any problems, especially if the infection involved their kidneys.

This information is for educational use only, and is not a substitute for prompt professional medical advice. Readers should always consult a physician or other professional for advice and treatment. ©BMJ Publishing Group Limited 2008. All rights reserved.