Blood Urine Nitrogen And Chronic Kidney Disease

Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) is a progressive kidney disease which is characterized by an increasing inability of the kidney to keep normal levels of the following products: protein metabolism (such as urea nitrogen), sodium, normal blood pressure, water and potassium. There are some measurements to monitor kidney function, such as serum creatinine, blood urine nitrogen and urinalysis. Once people are diagnosed with CKD, their blood urine nitrogen (BUN) is usually high. However, does high blood urine nitrogen mean you must experience Chronic Kidney Disease?

Blood Urine Nitrogen is abbreviated to BUN which is the metabolin of protein. In a normal condition, BUN is filtered out of our body by our kidneys, so BUN level is always maintained in a normal range. Just like creatinine level, BUN also reflects kidney function. Generally speaking, only when at least half of kidney function is damaged, can blood urine nitrogen increase rapidly. Thus, high BUN usually indicates kidney problems, that is because your kidneys are impaired, losing the ability of filtering blood urine nitrogen out of your body. In this case, blood urine nitrogen builds up in your body which leads to high blood urine nitrogen. If you are diagnosed with Chronic Kidney Disease and your lab tests show that your blood urine nitrogen is high, we can say your high BUN is caused by CKD.

However, other conditions may also cause high blood urine nitrogen, like high protein intake, infection, bleeding of intestinal tract and so on. In this case, high BUN is just raised temporarily and after some time, it can be in a normal level automatically. Therefore, high blood urine nitrogen does not mean you have Chronic Kidney Disease.

High blood urine nitrogen does have some relation with Chronic Kidney Disease. Only when you are diagnosed with CKD and your lab tests show your blood urine nitrogen is high, you can say high BUN is caused by your Chronic Kidney Disease. Otherwise, you cannot say CKD causes high BUN, because there are other conditions as we mentioned above causing high BUN.