Apart from the 24-hour creatinine clearance, also formulas to estimate the glomerular filtration rate (GFR) are increasingly used to get an impression from renal function in recent years. Based on these renal function measurements, clinical decisions are made as well as drug dose adjustments. The use of reliable serum creatinine measurements is therefore important to get accurate renal function estimates. However, serum creatinine is one of the most variable routine laboratory tests.
The importance of calibration to a traceable reference measurement of serum creatinine has been stressed. However, this standardization does not correct for analytical non-specificity problems, which occurs in certain techniques to measure creatinine, leading to under- or overestimation of the true creatinine concentration.
The aim of this cross-sectional observational study is to examine the degree of variability between diverse methods to measure creatinine in plasma and urine in a heterogenous group of Caucasian people with and without renal function loss and the influence hereof on the 24-hour creatinine clearance and the Modification of Diet in Renal Disease study equation and the consequences for chronic kidney disease staging.
