Urine – What You Need to Know

Urine – What You Need to Know

Urine is a waste product of the body, carrying away waste materials and toxins filtered from the blood. The color, smell, composition, and properties of urine can reflect your health status. Here is some basic information about urine:

Urine Volume:

• Decreased: When you have a fever, mercury poisoning, lead poisoning, acute gastritis, diarrhea, cholera.

• Anuria: When you have mercury poisoning, kidney stones, decreased blood pressure in the kidneys (due to severe heart failure), kidney failure.

Color:

• Normal Color: Yellow, orange yellow, due to pigments like urobilin, urocrom in oxidized form.

• Red: Due to urinary excretion of hemoglobin (hemolytic jaundice, malaria, phosphorus poisoning) or hematuria (urethral damage, prostate cancer, bladder stones, kidney stones, nephritis, kidney tuberculosis, kidney cancer).

• Reddish Brown: Due to high levels of urobilin (in liver disease).

• Cloudy: Due to epithelium and mucin (after a short time).

Smell:

• Ammonia-like Smell: Due to the decomposition of urea into NH3 by bacteria (when left for a long time).

• Acetone Smell: In diabetes mellitus (due to the pancreas).

• Foul Smell: In severe infections, kidney cancer, bladder cancer.

Composition:

• pH:

• Acidic: In diabetes mellitus (due to high levels of ketones in urine).

• Alkaline: In urinary tract infections, cystitis (due to the decomposition of urea into NH3).

• Surface Tension: Lower than water, bile salts decrease the surface tension of urine.

• Amino Acids: Glycine and histidine are the two most abundant amino acids in urine.

• Uric Acid: Increased in leukemia, decreased in nephritis.

• Urea: Increased in diabetes, febrile diseases, decreased in liver diseases, nephritis.

• Creatine: Increased in muscular atrophy, as muscles have a reduced ability to retain creatine in the form of phosphocreatine.

• Urobilinogen and Urobilin: Increased in cirrhosis, infectious hepatitis.

• Red Blood Cells: Urethral damage, prostate cancer, bladder stones, kidney stones, nephritis, kidney tuberculosis, kidney cancer.

• Hemoglobin (Hb): Hemolytic jaundice, malaria, phosphorus poisoning.

• Stone Sediment: 80% are calcium oxalate and phosphate, the rest are uric acid and urates.

• Chyle: Milky white, occurs in filariasis with damage to the lymphatic vessels in the kidney and bladder.

• Lipids: Fatty degeneration of the kidneys, phosphorus poisoning.

• Nitrites: Urinary tract infection.

Note: This information is for reference only. If you have any health concerns related to urine, please consult a doctor.