I just had a quick question that maybe you all have experience with that can help me... I just got my labs back from my endocrinologist, which he says to me, hey, they look fantastic, keep up the good work. I really didn't pay much attention to the paper until I got to my car and when I looked everything did look great with the exception of my creatinine levels which are extremely high. The reference range is 20-320 mg/dl and I'm all the way at 692 mg/dl. More than double the high point. Everything that I know and have looked up states that it's linked with my kidneys not filtering properly. Is this something that I should call him up on? Should I be concerned? I mean, I don't want to lose a kidney or anything, so I'm not sure if I should just let it go or pursue this further....
This creatinine test was measured in your urine; creatinine is also measured in blood but a much smaller number.
Did you have a high BG at the time of the urine test? Bernstein writes the following about creatinine test results: “Creatinine is a chemical by-product of muscle metabolism, and is present in your bloodstream all the time. Measuring the clearance of creatinine from the body is a way of estimating the filtering capacity of the kidneys, in comparison with normal kidneys. Test values are usually higher than normal when a person is spilling a lot of sugar in the urine, and eventually lower than normal when the kidneys have been damaged by years of elevated blood sugars. It is not surprising to see a sudden but appropriate drop in creatinine clearance when blood sugars are normalized and urine glucose vanishes.”
So it sounds like it is not unexpected that your urine creatinine will be high, if your BG was high and you were spilling glucose into your urine at the time of the test. Sounds like it is certainly better than getting a lower than normal test. If you’ve saved results of previous tests you could compare your creatinine and BG from those tests.
It sounds like it you shouldn’t be concerned about this test, but it could be another reminder to try to get your BG’s lower (like we need another reminder). But it certainly wouldn’t hurt to call and talk to your endo.
Creatinine is a product of protein metabolism. Basically, when the body breaks down the protein you eat, creatinine is formed. Creatinine is a waste product, the body does not use it, and it has to be excreted in the urine. High creatinine levels in the urine can be caused by many different things, many of them benign, such as eating a big steak dinner the night before the test. It’s really not necessarily an indication that your kidneys aren’t working well. Now, high creatinine in your blood is another matter. That is almost exclusively a sign that your kidney function is deterioriating, because they are not able to clear the waste creatinine out of your blood. So, unless your doctor tells you otherwise, don’t worry too much about high urine creatinine. Now, if your blood creatinine goes up, that’s another matter altogether.
I’m going to have my blood Crestinine levels checked on Monday and my urine rechecked. I don’t eat high protein meals, mostly don’t eat meat but once in a blue moon, so I’m pretty sure that it’s not from that. On a side note, my birth mother, also was a type 1, died from kidney disease, so I think that’s why I’m kinda concerned.
I would def. suggest getting it rechecked, high creatinine would mean your kidney function is low which is what my doctor told me, my creatinine came back pretty low on my last lab so I asked a lot of ?'s concerning it. My endo said the lower it is the better.
