Diabetes & Urine Dipstick

A urine dipstick is used to carry out a basic urinalysis which shows the basic composition of your urine. If you are asked to use a urine dipstick then you should try to immerse the dipstick in a sample of your midstream urine that has been collected in a sterile container and ensure that you hold the dipstick horizontally before you read off the results. The dipstick will have colour coded boxes and a key code to tell you exactly what the results are. Urine normally contains water, urea (excess nitrogen), urobilin (from old red blood cells), inorganic salts (such as sodium and chloride) and a number of other compounds (such as proteins). However, certain conditions and diseases can cause a change in the composition of your urine that can be detected with a urine dipstick and act to diagnose you will these diseases. For example, an elevated amount of sugar in your urine could suggest that you have uncontrolled diabetes. This is because the sugar enters your urine via your kidneys that filter it out of your blood. If you are diabetic then you will have a larger amount of sugar in your blood (as the cells of your body will be unable to absorb the sugar out of your blood) which means that a larger amount of sugar will be filtered out of your blood by your kidneys.


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