Urine Protein 3+ and High Creatinine in Hypertensive Nephropathy

Hypertensive Nephropathy is a kind of kidney disease caused by long-term poor controlling of high blood pressure. Initially, when high blood pressure damages the kidneys, the patients don’t have evident symptoms. However, at the very primary course, active treatment may reverse the disease. If people have urine proteinuria 3+ and high creatinine, that means an advanced stage of Hypertensive Nephropathy, and the patients should treat the disease seriously to prevent the disease from progressing.

Our kidneys are just filtering balls surrounded by capillaries to discharge toxins into urine and stop substances such as proteins and red blood cells from escaping. High blood pressure will increase pressure inside renal capillaries and cause leakage of proteins. The proteins when being forced out will damage the filtering system of the kidneys. The incidence rate of kidney damage caused by high blood pressure is in positive correlation to the duration and severity of hypertension. People who can well control their high blood pressure can delay or slow damage on their kidneys.

Clinically, nocturia, or increased night urination, is actually the earliest manifestation of kidney disease caused by high blood pressure. Proteinuria follows nocturia and the amount of proteins in urine increase as renal glomerular filtering cells’ damage worsening. As we have mentioned, the kidneys discharge toxins from bloodstream. Creatinine as a representative of those toxins will be tested to evaluate how well the kidneys are functioning. To be noted, however, serum creatinine test is not a sensitive indicator for kidney function because only if kidney function is halved will creatinine level in bloodstream increase.

Thereby, combination of protein 3+ and high creatinine suggests that the kidneys have been very severely impaired by high blood pressure. Hypertension and kidney scarring will affect each other. Not only hypertension damages the kidneys, but also kidney lesioning will aggravate high blood pressure. So progression of kidney damage and high blood pressure forms a vicious cycle to make hypertensive kidney disease progress rapidly. So please stick to low sodium diet and manage blood pressure as prescribed by your doctors. As for the treatment, we may expect to improve the damaged kidneys through accelerating blood circulation, reducing filtering pressure, resisting inflammation, removing stasis and supplementing sufficient blood and nutrients to nourish the kidneys. Only if kidneys get improved, can the proteinuria be under control and creatinine lowered effectively.