Specific Gravity Improves Identification of Clinically Significant Quantitative Proteinuria from the Dipstick Urinalysis.

Key Points: Urine albumin-to-creatinine ratio and urine protein-to-creatinine ratio are frequently obtained and represent possible tools for screening for proteinuria and thus early CKD. Adding specific gravity to dipstick proteinuria improves the ability to screen patients with clinically significant proteinuria and can be used to identify patients with early CKD.

Background: CKD is often underdiagnosed during early stages when GFR is preserved because of underutilization of testing for quantitative urine albumin-to-creatinine ratio (UACR) or urine protein-to-creatinine ratio (UPCR). Semiquantitative dipstick proteinuria (DSP) on urinalysis is widely obtained but not accurate for identifying clinically significant proteinuria.

Methods: We identified all patients with a urinalysis and UACR or UPCR obtained on the same day at a tertiary referral center. The accuracy of DSP alone or in combination with specific gravity (SG) against a gold-standard UACR ≥30 mg/g or UPCR ≥0.15 g/g, characterizing clinically significant proteinuria, was evaluated using logistic regression. Models were internally validated using ten-fold cross-validation. The SG for each DSP above which significant proteinuria is unlikely was determined.

Results: Of 11,229 patients, clinically significant proteinuria was present in 4073 (36%). The area under the receiver-operating characteristic curve (95% confidence interval) was 0.77 (0.76 to 0.77) using DSP alone and 0.82 (0.82 to 0.83) in combination with SG ( < 0.001), yielding a specificity of 0.93 (SEM=0.02) and positive likelihood ratio of 9.52 (SEM=0.85). The optimal SG cutoffs to identify significant proteinuria were ≤1.0012, 1.0238, and 1.0442 for DSP of trace, 30, and 100 mg/dl, respectively. At any SG, a DSP ≥300 mg/dl was extremely likely to represent significant proteinuria.

Conclusions: Adding SG to DSP improves recognition of clinically significant proteinuria and can be easily used to identify patients with early stage CKD who may not have otherwise received a quantified proteinuria measurement for both clinical and research purposes.