Is Creatinine Level More Important than GFR Level?
A.Your question is excellent as it penetrates a key issue in monitoring patients at risk of progression of chronic kidney disease (CKD). Ideally, your doctor would like to look inside your kidneys to judge ongoing damage in terms of injured tissue, unwanted cells or infection. Because that would require either penetrating the kidney with some sort of scope device or sticking a biopsy needle through your skin and muscle to get a piece of kidney to look at under the microscope (biopsy), we rely on measuring blood chemicals that rise or fall as waste products are passed into urine. Wastes are removed from blood by being filtered through parts of the kidneys tubes called glomeruli, while the blood cells and big proteins like albumin stay in the blood. Think of it as what happens when coffee is made by filtration but the coffee grounds stay behind on the filter. This process is called glomerular filtration and the rate at which it occurs is the glomerular filtration rate or GFR. To measure
