This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

J. M. T. Hamilton-Miller, DSc
Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine London, England

JAMA. 1994;272(8):588.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.

—Dr Avorn and colleagues¹ demonstrate convincingly that ingestion of cranberry juice prevents bacteriuria in the elderly. In speculating as to the mechanism of this effect, however, they appear not to consider a very simple explanation, namely, a direct antibacterial action of hippuric acid.

It is well established that eating cranberries causes relatively large amounts of hippuric acid to be excreted in the urine. As reported by Bodel et al,² Blatherwick and Long found in 1923 that 350 g of cranberries produced 4.7 g of hippuric acid (1.34% weight/weight [w/w]), and a calculation from figures published by Bodel et al² shows that for each liter of cranberry juice cocktail ingested (approximately 330 g of cranberries), 1.9 g of hippuric acid was excreted (mean of seven experiments), yielding 0.58% w/w. The origin of this hippuric acid is presumably the benzoic and quinic acids present in cranberries. . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Footnotes
Edited by Drummond Rennie, MD, Deputy Editor (West), and Margaret A. Winker, MD, Senior Editor.

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?