 Welcome to Nursing School Explained in this video on the lab test of creatinine. Now this is a very standard test that we many times see on the complete or the comprehensive metabolic panel and let us know about the kidney function but let's look a little bit deeper as to what the creatinine really assesses. So first of all I've written down a reference range here from 0.8 to 1.2 but always remember that it depends on whatever lab you're working with and make sure you check the reference range for the specific lab and what they have there so that you know if your patient's value is in or outside the normal range. And whenever it comes to creatinine what it is is a byproduct of protein metabolism so we always want to think with protein we always want to think about muscles and creatinine is produced proportional to muscle mass which means the less muscle mass you have the less creatinine you're going to have. So people who are older typically have less muscle mass and therefore their creatinine might be a little bit lower than expected. Creatinine is usually filtered out by the kidneys and then excreted by in the urine and so that means that we use it very commonly to diagnose any kind of renal disorders or monitor those. And so it's always used or usually used in combination with BUN, blood urea, nitrogen but the creatinine value in itself is more specific to diagnosing renal disease and the reason is that the level of the BUN can be influenced by the patient's hydration status by their fluid volume status and the creatinine is not affected by the patient's fluid volume status or whatever diet they have consumed. And here is a very important part in red if the patient has a normal creatinine level but the BUN is elevated that usually means that we have dehydration or what we also call fluid volume deficit but if both creatinine and BUN are elevated that usually means that there is something going on with the patient's kidneys. And this might be anything from some acute injury like pulmonary nephritis, ruptomyolysis or chronic end-stage renal disease and please check out my renal disorder playlist where I go more into details about those specific disorders. Now when do we check the renal dysfunction and this is something that your professors might ask you it's not just the answer shouldn't be it's a standard test on a metabolic panel but we assess for renal disorders we also monitor those and then we always check the renal function by checking the patient's creatinine before we give any drugs that might be nephrotoxic so toxic to the kidneys certain antibiotics fall into this classification as well as chemotherapy drugs and even IV dye for CT contrast so keep that in mind and that's why we always have to fill out that questionnaire and or get the patient's creatinine check before we administer the contrast and then we also helps us to assess the patient's glomerular function. So thanks for watching this video on creatinine hopefully it allows you to understand the lab a little bit better and what's really behind it please also check out my other videos in the lab test playlist so that you can get a better understanding also check out the renal disorders and then another specific video on BUN and also creatinine clearance so that you can tie all those together and know how they all work together to help us evaluate the patient's kidney function. Thanks for watching Nursing School Explained see you soon.