What Is the Importance of a Urinalysis?
More Programs and Publications Featuring Dr. Kyle Riding
In this program:
Urinalysis can be used to check a variety of things. Watch as medical laboratory scientist Dr. Kyle Riding shares insight about the different test balances and medical conditions that can be monitored or picked up via urinalysis.
Transcript
Interviewer:
Can you give us a high-level explanation of what urinalysis is, and why it is important?
Dr. Kyle Riding:
Absolutely, this is one of those tests that we've all encountered in our life, but we seldom appreciate the importance. So the kidneys are two of the most vital organs that you have in your body, they're in charge of water balance, electrolyte balance, acid-base balance of maintaining a good pH in your body. They're responsible for removing toxic waste products into your urine, so they're incredibly important. So it's important that we sit back and we evaluate them and you know, sometimes we don't want to just draw blood when we don't need to, if we don't need to, because driving blood, as simple as it is, for those of us who know how to do it, it's stressful for the patient, it's unnatural to have a stranger come up to you with a needle and say to me your arm, let me stick the needle in. I remember as a kid, it took three people holding me down to be able to get blood from me, however, when I was a kid, I was a squirmy thing as a kid, when I was a kid, every year at my physical, I do remember being asked to urinate into a cup, and I knew that they were doing a test on it, but little did I know in that cup, that was so easy to give as a sample, we all urinate throughout the day, and it's all very easy to give as a sample...
No needles involved in a routine urinalysis, but there was a lot that was told about the most...some of the most important organs in my body, the kidneys, through that very simple test, so it's simple, it's a great screening test, and it really helps us detect early a host of conditions that can impact those vital organs.
Interviewer:
Thank you. So I guess that it's a very important test, then we tend to give it credit for, but it doesn't always provide us with a definite diagnosis, correct?
Dr. Kyle Riding:
That is correct, it is a great screening test, it will identify that something could be wrong, but it doesn't always really confirm what that something wrong is. So for example, let's take for a second tier, we were to have a urinalysis that was positive for proteins in the urine...well, proteins are big, big molecules, they're so big that they shouldn't be able to make it through the little filters in your kids, so we shouldn't see protein in the urine, but let's say you have a positive protein...well, that's abnormal. So we know something's going on, but we don't know what that something is. It could be an immune response is happening somewhere in your urinary tract, or it could be something worse where your kidneys have a great degree of damage to them, to the point where those little filters are allowing these big molecules through that they shouldn't. So follow-up testing is usually required when there's abnormal findings on urinalysis.
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