This Article  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citing articles on HighWire  • Citing articles on Web of Science (5)  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Leonard B. Berman, MD

JAMA. 1977;237(25):2753-2754.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

RED URINE to all but the color blind is an attention-getting event. The patient is likely to seek help quickly but will seldom bring the urine with him. Questions about color often yield colorful answers that leave the physician tinged with uncertainty. The first rule follows: try hard to obtain a sample of the discolored urine. The corollary of this rule is to interpret the word "red" loosely enough to encompass orange, pink, red, brown, and black. The inclusion of brown-black allows for situations in which contact with urine changes blood pigments into differently colored derivatives. Assuming that one obtains the sample of red urine, the second rule is invoked: separate the possibilities into heme pigments (positive occult blood tests) and all others (negative occult blood tests).

There are three clinical possibilities—hematuria (RBCs), hemoglobinuria (from an elevated plasma hemoglobin), and myoglobinuria (from skeletal muscle damage).

Hematuria

The easiest to recognize . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
From St Joseph Hospital, Orange, Calif. Reprints not available.

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?