What your urine says about your health

Abnormal changes in the colour or smell of
urine should be reportedPaying particular attention to simple things in your body system may help prevent falling prey to many health problems. Experts say monitoring the colour or smell of one’s urine, for instance, could say much about your health. Omodele Idris reports.

URINE is a waste substance passed out of the body in liquid form. The colour or smell of urine says much about your health situation. Often, when patients visit the hospital, they are asked to go for urine test for actual diagnosis of the ailment. A trip to the toilet may be more revealing than you think. “The appearance and smell of your urine – as well as the frequency with which you have to go – can provide many clues to what is going on in your body,” says Dr. Michael Farber, director of the Executive Health Programme at Hackensack University Medical Centre in Hackensack, New Jersey.

If your urine is as colourless as water, well, that’s probably because you have been drinking a lot of water. And besides the inconvenience of going to the bathroom many times a day because your bladder is filling up with fluid faster, there is really nothing medically worrying about having a light coloured output. If your urine has a brownish, iced tea colour tinge, that could be a sign that you are dehydrated and the kidney is producing more concentrated (as opposed to diluted) urine. “The urine gives good indications of the body’s level of hydration,” Farber says, “so if a patient complains of dizziness or light-headedness, you would want to check the urine to rule out dehydration as a cause of the problem.” The ideal shade to strive for, he said, is the colour of straw.

Another reason to get yourself checked out if you see dark urine, especially if it does not lighten up after you drink a few glasses of water, is that the cause could actually be blood. It would not be as obvious as a bright red drop in the toilet, but it could be a sign of bleeding higher up in the kidney which could be sweet smelling. Catching a whiff of something sugary sweet after you urinate might actually be a clue to something very serious going on in your body. “A sugary smell might indicate the presence of blood sugar that is being excreted in the urine,” says Farber. And a high concentration of blood sugar in the urine is one sign of diabetes. The kidney acts as a filter for all sorts of waste that flows through the body. But if your filter is damaged, things can leak out of it and end up being excreted in the urine.

In the case of diabetes, excess blood sugar sneaks out through a leaky filter and shows up in the urine. If you are pregnant, changes in the kidney filtration system can result in the presence of sugar in the urine. Whether pregnant or not, if a doctor finds sugar in your urine, he or she should order further tests to determine if diabetes is a concern. It can be a little bit disconcerting, but, smelling an odd odour when you urinate is probably nothing to be worried about. Certain foods – asparagus, most notoriously – produce a sulfur-containing amino acid. So when the food is broken down in the digestive system, those smelly substances are released, filtered through the kidney, and then make their way into the urine where they create an unpleasant scent. As soon as the food responsible has been fully digested and flushed from your system completely, the smell will vanish as well.

Bright yellow urine that looks nearly neon-coloured may seem somewhat alarming, but the cause is most likely nothing more sinister than your daily multivitamin pill. “The B vitamins and carotene in particular give the urine a deeper, more golden colour,” says Dr. Deborah J. Lightner, associate professor of urology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. And don’t worry: That brightly coloured urine means you’re simply missing away all of your expensive supplements. The urine colour can be affected as the vitamins filter through your system – even as they are being absorbed and utilised.

Seeing a splash of red in the toilet can mean many things – some quite benign, others quite serious. “For that reason, you should always have your doctor check your urine if you see blood,” warns Lightner. “In an otherwise healthy young woman, the chances are overwhelmingly in favour of it being a sign of a urinary tract infection, but blood in the urine is also one of the seven deadly signs of bladder cancer in both women and in men. “Beyond the possibilities of infection or (worst case scenario) cancer, blood in the urine can also be caused by microscopic trauma or tears (not uncommon after an endurance event like a marathon), kidney stones, or as a side effect of taking blood-thinning medication or daily aspirin therapy.

According to Dr. Kazeem Rasaq Adewale of the Oyo State Hospital, Ring-Road, Ibadan, the urine says a lot about what one eats, drinks or the ailment one has. He said, through urine test, one would diagnose the ailment and the particular drug to prescribe. Dr. Adewale said a lot of things can be detected through urine tests, stating that there are basically two types – urinality and urine m/c/s. Through urine test, he said, one can detect whether a patient has diabetes or infection of the uniary tract whereby the patient passes blood in urine. Through this, he said, one can also detect what is called urinary tract infection where “you see a lot of bruises, scars and that.” In urine m\c\f, he said one could detect the actual organism that is causing the disease. “M” stands for microscopy “C” for culture and “S” for sensitivity.

“The idea of this terminology is to detect the organisms causing the problem in the patient”. In urine, you can use it to access if the patient is pregnant as well as detect what is called the bilrubin level, especially in the lung. Children when they have yellowness of the eyes, you can actually know if it is actually bilrubin derangement. Once you request for a urine test, you can actually know the level or cause(s) of the yellowness of the eyes. The result may guide you to whether you will go ahead to do X-ray from bilrubin level to know the actual level of that bilrubin so you will actually know the diagnosis and the appropriate treatment of it. “Through urine also, you can also detect those athletes who are also on drugs because there are some antibodies that could be detected. These are drugs that they should not use to enhance their performances, he added.

Dr. Pelumi Demuren of the Hillcrest Hospital, Lagos, said it is very good for everyone to always check the colour or smell of his or her urine to know if anything is amiss. He thus supported the idea of one drinking at least a gallon of water everyday as a way of cleansing one’s system.