Male1: The urine looks normal and the doctor knows there is a little bit of red blood cells in there and he checks it a few times and they do a sonogram—other people they actually can have a little bit of blood in the urine and not be a big problem?
Male2: That is correct. Blood in the urine is not uncommon either. Blood in the urine can be caused by many, many different things and many are benign and sometimes, it is not. Stones can cause blood in the urine, inflammation in the kidney can cause blood in the urine. Regarding your question, many kids have blood in the urine, but if you repeat it a couple of times, it may disappear. The question is what happens if it does not? We do tests to see if there is any disease that can cause this blood in the urine, we do ultrasounds to see if there is any anomaly, but if we see that all the laboratory workup is normal and the patient is normal, we just call it asymptomatic microscopic hematuria and we follow periodically.
Male1: Does it run in families sometimes?
Male2: I was going into that. It does run in families. We call it sometimes, when it runs in families, we call it benign familial hematuria. What is interesting is that maybe it is genetic and we usually do not test and we usually do not do biopsies to confirm why the patient has hematuria, however, studies done in the adult population, a while ago have shown that there are diseases that are benign and that run families and can cause this blood in the urine. What do we do? If the situation does not worsen, if the blood in the urine stays stable, we watch it periodically and we do not need to do anything, we do not need to give any medication, we just ach because things can get worse and that is what we want to do if we want to see if the condition is worse.
Male1: Is that common or occasionally, we get a sonogram and show something else?
Male2: Correct, yes sure.
Male1: Because sometimes, there are some things that can present that way, but generally it is not, but you can always have your primary care physician and evaluate and follow up because there can always be a problem that is not working well.
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