Your doctor will start by doing some special blood and urine tests. One the one hand these are to come to a diagnosis, e.g. why do you have high bloodpressure, and on the other hand these tests will give us information as to how much damage is done to vital organs of your body.
Tests
Bloodtests
Bloodtest can tell us a lot about what is happening in our body. To test the kidney function we will measure a value in your blood, called creatinine. Creatinine is a waste product that will increase in your blood if your kidneys are not able to do blood cleaning as they should do. The more creatinine in your blood, the more your kidneys are failing their function.
Urine tests
Urine tests give us important clues how your kidneys are doing and how much damage has been done to them already. What we are specifically looking for is how much protein there is in your urine. As protein is an essential building block of our body, you ideally would see no protein or only minimal amounts of it in the urine (under half a gram per litre of urine). you should see the kidneys, cleaning our blood as a coffee filter, of which you have 1 million in each kidney (amazing!). When the pressure in our blood vessels increases, these filters will be damaged and start to leak some proteins as the holes in the filter become bigger. So, the more protein we find in your urines, the worse the situation with the kidneys is. We can test this with a single stick (called dipstick), but far more precise is, when you given a spot urine to the laboratory, or even, we let you collect during 24 hours all the urine you produce in order to measure how much you leak over a whole day. The other impoirtant thing about measuring protein in the urines is that we can use it as a measure of success of the treatment. If the bloodpressure comes down, we often see the protein leak improving as well.
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