Background: A frequent problem that family doctors face is the meaning of small quantities of blood or protein in urine samples. Patients with this problem are often either neglected or referred to specialists for complex, expensive, and often invasive diagnostic procedures. Exercise testing has never been considered in nephrology, except for some attempts in diabetic patients.
Methods: We report on a study conducted over 12 years with patients referred for slight hematuria and/or proteinuria to determine whether exercise testing could be a diagnostic aid in some or all of them. We performed exercise testing using a treadmill preceded and followed by urine analysis, with a kidney biopsy within 10 days. Of the 94 patients enrolled in the study, only those with a positive exercise test turned out to have parenchymal nephropathy. At the end of the study, we simplified the quantification of exertion, dispensing with the treadmill and drastically reducing the number of urinary parameters considered.
Results: In patients with histological evidence of kidney damage, most of the variables increased significantly after the test. Statistical analysis also showed that determination of proteinuria and hematuria alone guaranteed maximum predictability. We found that it is also possible to simplify the quantification of effort/exertion and to drastically reduce the number of urinary parameters and still obtain significant results.
Conclusions: Exercise testing provides useful information about the significance of microhematuria and proteinuria, reducing the number of cases that need to be referred to specialists. The method needs to be validated in other studies, but our results suggest that family doctors could use simple dipsticks to screen the many cases of microhematuria or proteinuria observed in daily practice. The method seems useful in eliminating doubts and unnecessary diagnostic costs.
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