How Serum Creatinine in blood is brought to normal?

Question

A patient has 1335 umol/l range of Serum Creatinine. How it can be reduced?

Answer 1

I hope it's not a homework question for you... it's a rather difficult one to answer in just a few words but here goes...

Elevated creatinine often suggests renal failure. This is because the kidneys are responsible for removing the creatinine (among many other things) from the blood; if the creatinine is rising, the most common cause is that the kidneys are failing.

Most often, the first thing that's tried is to find and reverse the cause of the renal failure; if this is successful, the creatinine will often fall as the kidneys heal themselves.

Renal failure can be divided into three types of causes,
1. Pre-renal
2. Intra-renal
3. Post-renal

Pre-renal failure occurs when the kidneys do not receive enough blood - they then are unable to do their job of filtering the blood. This often happens with severe dehydration but also could happen with shock from other causes (such as blood loss). Typically, patients are hospitalized and the fluids or blood are replaced intravenously and the kidneys often recover fully.

Intra-renal failure occurs when the kidneys themselves are injured - could be from a lifetime of diabetes and/or high blood pressure or it could be from medication or autoimmune disease or other causes. These patients typically require a nephrologist (kidney specialist) to sort out the cause and institute proper treatment.

Post-renal failure occurs when the flow of the urine from the kidneys to the outside world is blocked and this causes the kidneys to shut down. Restoring the flow of the urine usually helps the kidneys resume normal functioning. Sometimes the blockage is simply a swollen prostate; sometimes the blockage is something more sinister.

FINALLY... for those patients who have unfortunately lost their kidneys entirely (typically due to intra-renal disease), dialysis is required. Serum creatinine will rise in between dialysis treatments and then fall during a dialysis session and then rise again until the next treatment.

Hope this helps.