What could your urine color tell you about what's going on inside your body? Typically, your urine should be pale yellow in color.

why-your-urine-color-is-a-warning-sign-you-shouldn39t-ignore

Why Your Urine Color is a Warning Sign You Shouldn&#39;t Ignore

what does it mean if your urine is red or orange or green or any other color on the spectrum of the rainbow I'm Dr Rena Malik urologist and pelvic surgeon and today we're going to go over what your urine color means and if that means you should go see a doctor right away as a background urine is 95 made up of water the other five percent is made up of metabolites and minerals like sodium chloride and in fact the thing that makes your urine yellow is a product called urobilin and this is actually a breakdown product of our red blood cells and so it's very normal to have yellow urine and the color that you should be aiming for is light pale yellow and that usually means that you're drinking enough fluid and your body is not dehydrated and not over hydrated if it becomes clear or transparent then it may be a sign that you are over drinking too much and in some cases if this happens it's probably not a big deal but if it continues to be a persistent problem it could mean that you're having over hydration and in this case that may actually cause imbalances in your body and you could have Danger things like hyponatremia and hyponatremia is essentially a sign that there's too low sodium in your body this can cause symptoms like nausea vomiting confusion or an altered mental state this is very rare but if it does happen it could be a sign that you're drinking too much in fact there have been some reports of marathon runners who've over hydrated during marathons and subsequently developed hyponatremia and they started having these symptoms and when they took their blood to check they found that actually their sodium levels were too low if you have dark yellow urine or Amber looking urine it could be a sign that you're not drinking enough if you're not drinking enough usually your urine becomes dark because your body is essentially regulating how much you're drinking and trying to conserve fluid inside the body rather than peeing it out so that's not necessarily a dangerous thing however that dark yellow urine can actually irritate the bladder lining and cause you to have an urge to urinate more frequently and feel this sudden desire to Journey that you can't delay that can become quite bothersome so again it's always really great to keep your urine a light yellow color the next thing that is kind of close to Yellow would be orange urine and why do you get orange urine well it could actually be from what you're eating so if you're eating a lot of foods with beta carotene like carrots for example it can actually turn your urine orange certain medications like Pyridium or over-the-counter Azo can also turn your urine Orange in fact even certain over-the-counter medications for example Senna which is a common medication used for constipation can turn your urine orange as well most of the time orange urine will clear itself once the medication's out of the system or you've stopped eating the food if however you have persistent orange urine and you've drank lots of fluid and you've cleared out whatever you're doing that could have caused orange urine then it's important to see your doctor because it could be a sign of other problems in your body like those of the liver or the bile duct so brown colored urine or urine that looks like Coca-Cola so the most common times that we see this are in people who have over exercise and developed a condition called Rhabdomyolysis in this case when you over exercise the actual muscle breaks down too quickly and it causes symptoms of muscle weakness pain nausea vomiting and overall feeling really really unwell typically you will know that you're not feeling great or you've done a really strenuous exercise like ran a marathon or did a CrossFit activity or something extremely strenuous in which case you'll find that you're having lots of pain and you should go to the emergency room this can also be seen with certain kinds of medications as well as certain kinds of infections so the important thing however is if you see this brown urine and you're not sure it's really important to go to the ER and make sure you get your blood test because if you leave Rhabdomyolysis untreated it can lead to kidney disease also you can have brown urine if you overdose on Tylenol or it could be a sign of liver or kidney disease or even a sign that you had blood in your urine that's now old so it's really important again if you're having brown urine to go see a doctor talk about it and get it checked out a couple other things you might see in the spectrum of yellow orange brown is having cloudy or foamy urine cloudy urine can be a sign of a urinary tract infection but if you're not having any symptoms of pain with urination or having the feeling of having to go more often than usual or more frequently than usual or having for example blood in the urine in which case it's very possible that you don't actually have a urinary tract infection or you have a slight infection that can just clear up with drinking lots of fluids the first thing I tell all my patients to do is drink lots of fluids and try to clear out that cloudy urine getting antibiotics for a sole symptom of cloudy or smelly urine for that example is actually going to hurt you in the long run if you want to learn more about this check out my video about smelly urine and foamy urine so I hear about this a lot and actually the most common and cause a foamy urine is having a really strong Stream So if you've been holding it for a long time and you get to the bathroom and you finally get there and you pee really really fast because you've been holding it for so long then you can see bubbles in the toilet which is just essentially a sign of how fast or the velocity of the urine however if it persists and you're not really having fast urine then it could be a sign of something like a fistula which is a connection between the colon or a small bowel and the bladder where gas could be getting into the bladder or it could be a sign of protein in the urine in those cases it's really important to see your doctor and get it checked out okay and before we get to Red urine I want to address a kind of weird color urine green or bluish urine so interestingly we often when you have a Urologic procedure can make your urine green or blue and this is sometimes done in Urologic surgery so that we can see urine coming out of the tubes that drain the kidneys in the bladder and so we'll give medications that will actually turn your urine either kind of a knee on green or a dark blue color and so don't be alarmed if you have a Urologic surgery and you then see your urine looking those colors it can be due to certain types of medication one of the medications that we prescribe for a patient sometimes is called uribel and that can turn urine blue it's often prescribed for people who have symptoms of bladder pain also amitriptyline which is an antidepressant medication can sometimes turn your urine different colors as well as propofol which is a medication given to patients during anesthesia and occasionally eating things like asparagus can make your urine a little bit green tinged as well however more commonly you'll have that very characteristic smell of urine after you eat asparagus and lastly why is your urine red and what exactly does that mean so red urine can be a number of different things sometimes eating things like beets and rhubarb can turn your urine a little bit pinkish in color also certain antibiotics can turn your urine red color as well usually if you're prescribed one of these medications your doctor will will tell you that hey you might notice that your yarn or even your tears are sometimes red but the real important thing to rule out if you see red in your urine is blood the real reason to get this checked out is because it can be a sign of something wrong in the urinary tract and by that I mean the kidneys which create urine the ureters which drain urine into the bladder and the bladder itself or the tube draining urine from the bladder to the outside world and in men's case a prostate gland which sits around the urethra or the P tube where urine comes out so having blood in the urine can signal a problem in any of these areas 85 percent of the time we don't find a discrete reason for the blood in the urine in men very often it's due to an enlarged prostate and in women we suspect if you're over 65 it may be due to having what we call vaginal atrophy which is actually the thinning of the vaginal skin which can create very small little bits of bleeding when it has any sort of trauma occurring to it or even with having sex this is actually very easy to suitable with vaginal estrogen so make sure you talk to your doctor about that if you're having issues and if you have an enlarged prostate that's causing you issues with urinary symptoms make sure you check out my video about enlarged prostate and what you can do about it but the important things we need to rule out are any tumors in the kidney any stones in the kidney which could cause infection or stones in the tubes that drain the kidney as well as tumors in the bladder itself the way we do this at the urologist's office is with a cystoscopy so a cystoscopy is a procedure where we take a small camera and we go in the bladder and we look around to make sure there are no tumors a lot of people wonder like why can't you just get a scan or an image to show if there are any tumors well if you think about the bladder it's like a balloon and so at any point in time the bladder might be a little bit empty or not completely full and so you can't kind of differentiate between folds in the bladder and actual tumors or abnormalities also we usually get a CAT scan or a CT scan with contrast to look at the kidneys as well as the tubes that drain the kidneys called the ureters so it's really important if you see red urine to go see your doctor and find it if there is any blood in the urine itself to just rule out anything dangerous again 85 of the time we don't find anything dangerous and very infrequently do we find a cancer or something you know really life-changing and so it's really important to get tested get checked out and just make sure you are safe because if there is something dangerous we want to catch it early before it becomes a problem all right I hope you guys enjoyed this video as always remember to take care of yourself because you're worth it if you're enjoying this Channel please make sure to subscribe and share this Channel with your friends I appreciate you guys so much foreign [Music]

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