The golden days of urine are here to stay, and “liquid biopsy” is not just for NephMadness. Discolorations of urine are common and never fail to startle both patients and professionals. When analyzing urine coloration, it is helpful…
Urinary tract infections (UTI) are among the most common medical disorders in the world. Bacteria are the main infectious agent that causes UTIs, and bacteriuria and leukocyturia are the hallmarks of urinary sediment in patients with UTI. Bacteria…
In the routine urinary sediment examination, you may come across 4 types of nucleated cells: 1. Squamous epithelial cells2. Leukocytes3. Transitional epithelial cells4. Tubular epithelial cells Let’s discuss how to differentiate between them. Squamous epithelial cells are easily…
All to often now doctors in well-resourced hospitals rely on high tech, expensive and sometimes invasive tests to make a diagnosis. One of the most basic and cheapest tools we have at our disposal is the bedside urine…
Following on from yesterday’s post about turtles who may have a taste of urine in their mouths, here’s an interesting historical diversion about doctors who, in the past, intentionally drank urine to diagnose disease. An article in Scientific…
Continuing the theme of must knows regarding urinalysis: Urine albumin is detected by the urine dipstick via a reaction with tetrabromophenol blue. The reaction produces a colorimetric result depending on the amount of albumin present, which can be…
Here are some simple facts about urine specific gravity, osmolality and their determination from the urinalysis. Specific gravity The reference substance for comparative purposes is water, which therefore has a specific gravity of 1.000. The so-called normal ranges…
My name is Will Pendergraft, and I just completed the clinical portion of the joint nephrology fellowship between Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital. I was inspired for the first time by Nate Hellman during my…
It was the usual sort of day in clinic and the team was seeing a middle aged woman with stable diabetic nephropathy and subnephrotic proteinuria. Her blood pressure and blood sugars had been well controlled since the last…
Red urine: it’s not always hematuria. The first step in evaluating the patient who complains of grossly red urine is to perform a standard urinalysis, focusing on (a) whether or not the dipstick turns heme-positive, and (b) whether…
