The purpose and goal of diagnostic testing is to provide healthcare providers with critical information for routine patient screening, timely disease diagnoses, and treatment plan monitoring to manage patient health and improve patient outcomes.
As a diagnostic test, urine dipstick urinalysis offers only qualitative results, and therefore has limited benefit.
Quantitative Urinalysis Testing provides health care providers fast, accurate, superior information – with results normalization – for better screening, diagnosis, treatment and monitoring of patient kidney, liver and urinary tract infection (UTI) conditions. In addition to delivering better health care, in-house Quantitative Urinalysis Testing offers health care providers and patients diagnostic testing convenience – and a new revenue stream for the healthcare facility.
QUA can provide more accurate testing, utilizing a small amount of urine and detecting potential infection at much lower levels. QUA also offers front-end screening to help identify high-risk patients, followed by confirmation with PCR testing. Inconsistency in threshold definitions for UTIs and a lack of standardization can mean that some low-level but insidious infections are overlooked.
High levels of ketones in the blood or urine can indicate diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA), a life-threatening complication of diabetes. DKA occurs when the body does not produce enough insulin, resulting in harmful ketone acid build-up in the blood. The condition can onset quickly and may lead to coma and death. DKA is most frequently associated with type 1 diabetes and accounts for about 14% of all hospital admissions of patients with diabetes and 16% of all diabetes-related fatalities.
Ketones include three acids produced by fat metabolism: acetone (2%), acetoacetic acid (20%), and B-hydroxybutyrate (BHB) (78%). Dipstick tests can only detect acetoacetic acid. Without specific results for acetone and BHB, individuals with DKA may go undiagnosed until symptoms appear, such as excessive thirst, frequent urination, vomiting, weakness, and confusion. Because QUA testing can identify and quantify all three types of ketone acids in urine, it offers a far safer and more effective approach for screening diabetic patients for DKA.
A few drops of urine can provide quantitative results that will help provide diagnostic information such as kidney failure, ketosis, diabetes, urinary tract infection, intrauterine drug exposure, and more when treating premature babies.
QUA can be used as a noninvasive screening tool to detect cancers such as multiple myeloma, bladder cancer, prostate and cervical.
Diabetes, glomerulonephritis (inflammation of the kidney cells), lupus, hypertension, and heart disease also require early protein detection.