Urine analysis

“Luckily, we took urine samples when setting up our general population cohorts and now we are able to receive an incredible amount of information at a considerably low price. Besides kidney function, we are investigating dietary markers and have obtained fantastic results when doing comparisons across cohorts. We found quite a lot of novel metabolites from unknown pathways and hope to be able to look into this more. There are so many things to investigate and plenty of data, we will still be busy for a long time and have to strictly prioritize what to do first. We also had the samples analyzed by conventional means and the correlation of creatinine was incredibly high, which was very reassuring.”

“For me as a nephrologist, urine is the most natural biofluid to work with and part of standard clinical practice. Physiologically it totally makes sense to see changes in urine in chronic kidney disease (CKD), as the metabolome is reflective of the current state of the body and urine is its excretory product. We are looking at the metabolic differences in early and late stages of CKD and are doing combined blood and urine analysis. However, I would very much like to encourage researchers from other areas as well to look further into urine, as for example cardiac and renal diseases have a lot in common with cardiovascular diseases being the leading cause of mortality in CKD patients. I am hoping that through urine we can find common pathways, which link renal and cardiovascular or even urological malignancies. Nightingale’s data is very easy to work with and straightforward, especially the ratios to creatinine are highly useful.”

“We profiled serum samples from our epidemiological studies utilizing Nightingale’s NMR-based platform. Hence, when Nightingale launched the urine service, we decided to profile our urine samples, as combining metabolites from serum and urine would provide us with the chance to identify specific metabolites associated with the presence and onset of DR, to correlate the underlying pathogenesis by comparing urine and serum markers, as well as whether the combination would improve disease prediction beyond traditional risk factors. We found special value in the combined analysis, as it provides independent information on the one hand, but also enables investigation of retention of metabolites in urine on the other hand. We are now planning to extend the analysis to other endpoints as well.”