How is kidney disease monitored?

How is kidney disease monitored? The two main tests that we use to monitor kidney functions are from the blood, and they're the serum creatinine and the BUN, which stands for blood urea nitrogen. Of those, the creatinine is the most important. It's the main one we look at. And the BUN to creatinine ratio gives us an idea of how hydrated or dehydrated you might be. Every now and again, we will force our patients to do the dreaded 24-hour urine test and the giant ugly orange jug. And the reason we do that is we can look at two things. The main one is we look at the protein, but we look at two types of protein, nonspecific protein and what we call Bench-Jones protein, which is the myeloma protein. And we want to make sure both are under control, because even if your myeloma protein is normal or zero, but your nonspecific protein is elevated, we may want to worry about other causes of kidney disease like high blood pressure or diabetes or even one of those deposition diseases.