What Does Having More Urea In The Blood Mean
For patients with kidney disease, a common abnormal condition in their body is high urea. Even though this condition can also appear in healthy people, but it has very different meaning in patients with kidney disease.
What is urea?
Urea is the metabolic product of protein, which should be filtrated out by kidney. In fact, its amount is calculated by means of how much nitrogen is in blood, which is a major substance in urea.
For patients with kidney disease, urea is an important standard to assess patient’s kidney function, and when there is much excess urea accumulating in patient’s blood, many health problems can be caused in patients’ body.
What is the normal urea level in our body?
The daily foods can provide us lots of protein, and urea will be produced when they are broken down. On the other hand, our kidneys will filtrate out the excess urea in blood continuously. Thereby, urea level in our blood can be kept in a stable range.
The normal urea nitrogen level is 3.2~7.1mmol/L (9~20mg/dL), which can reflect the urea level.
Why patients have more urea in blood?
As we have said, the urea level can reflect reflect patient’s kidney function.
In fact, urea level will not be higher than normal easily, because our kidney has strong compensation, and half normal kidney function will be able to guarantee our body health. So, patients with kidney disease will not have more urea than normal range unless more than half kidney function is damaged, and patient’ s condition is already very severe when they have high urea level.
But many factors can affect patient’s urea level, so temporary high urea may not indicate kidney damaged. But if patient’s high urea is persistent, that will be dangerous, because that is more likely to be caused by low kidney function, which indicates severe kidney damage.
Tag: High BUN Level
