Hello! I have been a doctor for 21 years. My name is Georgy Olegovich Sapego. In this article I will talk about urinary sediment.
Many have noticed in the results of urine tests cryptic records about urinary sediment.
There are two big parts to urinalysis. Firstly, this is the kind of chemistry when various substances dissolved in urine are cleverly identified, taken into account and counted. Secondly, these are various undissolved things that just float in the urine.
The floating components of urine are very small and must be viewed through a microscope. One could dip the microscope into a jar of urine and wait for something important to float in front of the objective. But this is long and inconvenient.
If you wait, then all the contents weighed in the urine will gradually sink to the bottom of the jar. From there, the sediment can be taken with a pipette and placed under a microscope.
If you don't want to wait, you can pour the urine into a test tube, put it in a centrifuge and spin it up. Then the sediment can be obtained very quickly. This is usually done in laboratories.
Cells
Most of the urinary sediment consists of cells.
Erythrocytes
These are red blood cells. Blood in your urine can be harmless or a sign of a serious medical condition. Even a thousandth of the blood in the urine can already be seen with the naked eye.
Blood in the urine may be constant, or it only appears occasionally.
In young people, temporary blood in the urine may be normal. This happens after physical activity or after something else.
Often blood in the urine enters during menstruation. This is an error in urine collection.
If blood in the urine is periodically found in a person over 50, then this is already more serious. This is how oncology sometimes manifests itself.
The simplest reason for the episodic appearance of blood in the urine is an infection in the urinary tract.
If there is even a minimal amount of blood in the urine, then it is necessary to find out the cause.
An interesting study was conducted in the Israeli army. After all, everyone serves them, and there is an opportunity to examine many young people in an organized way. So it turned out that even if a person is not worried about anything, but there is always a little blood in the urine, then he is 20 times more likely to lose his kidneys over the next 20 years.
Where does the blood come from?
It is one thing if a small stone slightly scratches the urinary tract. This will result in microscopic bleeding. Erythrocytes in the urinary sediment will be normal, even and beautiful.
Another thing is when blood flows out of the kidney itself. The kidney is like a filter or sieve. The liquid part of the blood flows into the urine, and the blood cells are retained. If the kidneys are damaged, blood cells begin to leak into the urine. They just seep or squeeze through a damaged sieve, so they will be deformed and ugly.
In fact, there is no hard and fast rule by which blood cells in urine can be called ugly. This will depend on the experience of the technician. But so you can understand that problems begin with the kidneys.
Leukocytes
These are white blood cells. Most often, they appear with urinary tract infections. This is a simpler situation.
Sometimes there are leukocytes in the urine, but they cannot find the infection. Then they begin to check the kidneys themselves. There are more serious problems in which white blood cells appear in the urine.
Epithelium
This line is also found in all urine tests. Epithelial cells cover the tubules within the kidneys and urinary tract. That is, all the places in our body that come into contact with urine. Epithelial cells can be flushed with urine from anywhere. This is normal.
Cylinders
An interesting thing. They literally look like cylinders. These are casts of the interior of the renal tubules.
Inside the kidneys, there is a complex network of fine tubules through which urine flows. If the urine is concentrated, or it stagnates, or something has changed a lot with its composition, then blood cells, epithelium and various other components of urine can be compressed inside the tubules into cylinders.
Even with serious kidney disease, the urine does not have to contain casts. But if they appear in the urinary sediment, then most likely something is wrong with the kidneys.
Crystals
A lot of dissolved salts are excreted in the urine. Under some conditions, salts can crystallize and precipitate. The crystals of different salts have their own characteristic shape. It turns out that even without any chemical analyzes, a laboratory assistant will determine the composition of these crystals by eye. So they monitor the formation of kidney stones and some other diseases.
Bacteria
Microbes are often found in urine sediment. If this is not a pregnant woman, then nothing is done with the bacteria found and no further examination is carried out.
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