Publication:

A comparison of spot urinary protein-creatinine ratio with 24-hour urine protein in quantification of proteinuria in women with hypertensive disorders of pregnancy

Background Proteinuria is a major indicator of hypertensive disorder of pregnancy. The gold standard for diagnosis of significant proteinuria is based on a 24hour urine collection which is cumbersome, time-consuming, and inconvenient to patients. A need, therefore, exists for a rapid, valid, and accurate test to identify significant urinary proteinuria.

Methods We conducted an observational cross-sectional hospital-based study wherein a total of 150 pregnant women who met the criteria of preeclampsia were taken. Spot urine samples for calculating the urine P/C ratio were taken immediately before 24hr urine collection. Correlation between 24hour urine protein and spot PCR was then determined by Pearson’s correlation coefficient(r).

Results The correlation coefficient (r) between 24hr urine protein and spot PCR was found to be 0.734 (n=150) which was highly significant with p<0.001. In this study, population the ROC curve analysis revealed the sensitivity of 90.3% and specificity of 97.3% with AUC 0.958 for a cut-off value of spot PCR as 0.43 to detect significant.

Conclusions Spot PCR is an accurate, valid, steady fast, reliable, and time-saving test which may be used as an alternative method for determining significant proteinuria in patients with pregnancy-induced hypertension.