3 Conditions Your Doctor Might Be Screening for When They Ask for a Urine Sample

Each day, the average human produces anywhere from 800 to 2,000 milliliters of urine, which is about 27 to 67 ounces. While urine may be a waste byproduct, it can reveal quite a bit about what’s going on inside your body. 

As a diagnostic tool, the team here at Healthy Life Family Medicine, under the direction of Dr. John Monroe, routinely turns to urine tests to gain more information about your health, whether during your physical exam or a sick visit.

To give you an idea about the invaluable information that we can glean from your urine, here’s a look at three conditions that we can track and/or diagnose through a quick-and-easy urinalysis.

1. Pregnancy

You suspect that you might be pregnant thanks to a skipped period or two, but don’t start setting up the nursery until we run a quick pregnancy test. And by quick, all we need is a small sample of your urine and a few minutes to check your urine for hCG — human chorionic gonadotropin.

The moment an egg is fertilized and implants itself, a woman’s body releases hCG, which is a growth hormone you only make during pregnancy.

In fact, those at-home pregnancy kits are designed to test for hCG in your urine and are largely accurate. That said, we recommend that you come see us for confirmation or if you're getting results that you don’t feel confident in.

2. Urinary tract infections

The quickest and best way to tell if you have an infection in your urinary tract — your bladder, urethra, or kidneys — is through a urinalysis.

More than half of women will get a urinary tract infection (UTI) at some point during their lives and women are 30 times more likely than men to develop this condition thanks to anatomy.

If we suspect that you have an infection somewhere along your urinary tract, our first diagnostic stop is the urine test, which allows us to check for bacteria. And, in many cases, the urine test is our last stop if we detect an infection. From there, we can get you on a course of antibiotics, which should clear the infection quickly if it hasn’t spread to your kidneys.

3. Kidney issues

Another way in which a urine test can prove very useful is in identifying potential kidney issues, such as stones, infection, cancer, or kidney disease.

When we collect a urine sample from you, we’re checking three things:

1. Color and clarity of your urine
2. Chemical makeup of your urine
3. Foreign bacteria and/or cells and cell fragments

Each of these values can guide us away from or toward a diagnosis, as well as help us keep track of existing and known kidney issues.

As you can see, a urinalysis can play an essential role in monitoring your health, and we only touched on three of the more common reasons why doctors regularly check urine.

If you have more questions about urinalysis or why we’re testing your urine, please don’t hesitate to contact our office in Goodyear, Arizona, today to set up an appointment.