What’s The Point of Detecting Microalbuminuria (MALB)

Urine and blood check-up are the two major approaches help diagnose Kidney Disease. But frequently-used indexes such as routine urine and serum creatinine, more often than that, report abnormalities of your kidney only after the medical condition has become pretty serious. However, microalbuminuria rises even at the very first stage of some Kidney Disease. That’s why detecting the MALB helps a lot.

What is microalbuminuria?

Healthy people excrete little protein in the urine, and the main component is albumin. MALB describes a medical condition that your albumin excretion is higher than a normal level (30-300mg). It can be measured by a single urine specimen or 24-hour collection, but routine urine analysis doesn’t detect MALB.

MALB is an important index and used to diagnose many Kidney Diseases. It is especially valuable in the diagnosis for those with Kidney Disease induced by Diabetes or high blood pressure. Microalbuminuria signals the early renal damages and suggests you to get treatment timely. Once the MALB progresses to clinical proteinuria, (meaning the protein in urine can be detected by routine urine analysis), then the protein increases and even interfere with various treatments, the disease will progress anyway. A long-term and heavy proteinuria damages your kidneys too, and also becomes an accomplice contributing to the progressive decreased kidney function. In people with high blood pressure or Diabetes, the microalbuminuria leaks from the urine signaling the patients’ whole small blood vessels are damaged already. Those patients easily develop cardiovascular disease.

All in all, routine urine analysis fails to detect the Kidney Disease in early stage, but microalbuminuria can. Therefore, I strongly suggest those with hypertension, Diabetes and obesity take regular check-ups, and more importantly, receive MALB from time to time.