The Urine Test: So Many Messages in the Bottle

June 30th, 2009

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It has been said before that you can learn a lot about a person by going through their trash and the same can be considered true in testing a person’s urine. As one of the most common forms of non-intrusive disease diagnosis, urine testing offers doctors some powerful means of identifying what medical conditions we might have. While most of us only hear of urine tests with respect to testing for pregnancy and testing for drug use, the number of types of urine tests available is quite considerable and continually growing.

Though urine testing has been around for a long time, the types of conditions that can be detected has grown considerably and the tests continue to become more powerful as the contents within urine have been tied to specific conditions while detection of specific chemicals in the urine has become more sophisticated. Although a search on Google for “home urine test” can bring up many online companies willing to sell tools for you to check your teenager or partner for drug and alcohol use, the more interesting tests are not yet readily available for those with a do-it-yourself mindset. At the same time, many of these tests require a bit more than peeing on a color changing dye to reveal one’s medical secrets.

Many of the interesting urine tests that could be of considerable value to public health are those intended for detection of cancer. One cancer in particular, prostate cancer, the number two cancer killer in the US, does not yet have accurate tests for its identification. Thus, any improvements in its diagnosis could save many lives.

The two common tests for prostate cancer, a rectal examination and a urine test called PSA sometimes falsely indicate cancer in some people and fail to detect the cancer in others. The result is that patients will often require a procedure where a tissue sample is taken, called a biopsy, for direct analysis. Because of this, a test that is currently under development could be very helpful. The new test, being developed at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, checks for levels of a chemical called sarcosine within the urine that has been found to have an approximate 80% correlation to spreading prostate cancer. The value of such a test is that it could allow doctors to better detect both the cancer and how aggressive it is.

Another urine test of interest is a test for lung cancer risk in those who smoke. As the leading cause of cancer death, lung cancer kills some 20,000 Canadians per year and 160,000 Americans. The test being researched at the University of Minnesota detects the level of one byproduct that is produced by the body as it attempts to break down the chemicals inhaled in cigarette smoke. From the results of the research, the scientists found that depending on the level of this chemical in the urine, the risk of developing lung cancer was from 43% to 850% higher than for other smokers who had low levels of the chemical in their urine. As a result, even though smokers all have a risk of lung cancer, they could know just how bad the risk might be on an individual basis.

Besides the possibility of detecting some cancers, urine tests also offer the possibility of detecting other conditions. For those who have had a kidney transplant, failure of the transplanted organ is a potentially life threatening situation. A new urine test of considerable value to these patients is a test to detect the presence of common viruses that have flourished in the presence of an immune system weakened by drugs used to prevent rejection of the organ. The researchers from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, found in their limited tests that 100% of those kidney transplant recipients with known viral kidney infection were confirmed to have the infection with the test. The test is valuable because it prevents the need for less accurate biopsies.

A future test that could be of value to a much larger percentage of the population is a urine test being developed by University Hospital Freiburg, Department of Cardiology in Freiburg, Germany. This test is used to identify patients with atherosclerosis or clogged arteries and as a urine test is far less invasive than the current test that requires inserting a small tube in an artery and directing the tube toward the heart. Though still in early stages of research, this test that analyzes protein fragments in the urine, was found to be 84% accurate in diagnosing those with the disease. Given that cardiovascular disease is the number one killer of people in the US, Canada, UK and Australia, any test that can more easily detect the condition will save many, many lives while at the same time saving considerable amounts of money for our health care systems.

Though analyzing our byproducts may not be all that glamorous, the power of urine testing is quite impressive and is only becoming a more powerful tool as science progresses. While the forefront of medical science continues to inspect our DNA to divine what conditions we may develop, urine testing is becoming better at telling us what we have now. So, the next time your doctor asks you to dribble a bit in the plastic sample bottle, consider just how much about yourself you might be revealing.

Related Links

http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Detection/early-prostate

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080201085639.htm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7878726.stm

http://www.cancer.org/docroot/CRI/content/CRI_2_4_1X_What_are_the_key_statistics_for_prostate_cancer_36.asp

http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/types/lung

http://www.cancer.ca/canada-wide/about%20cancer/cancer%20statistics/stats%20at%20a%20glance/lung%20cancer.aspx?sc_lang=en

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/146661.php

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_83569.html

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