What is Occult Blood and What are the Causes of Occult Blood?

Occult means that we can’t find the red blood cells in the urine by naked eye and by microscope, while, there is the positive response if we test with the test paper. Why? Because the heme will be released if the red blood cells are damaged, then we only can find the response by test parer. But why the red blood cells were damaged before they left out of the body. One reason is that the lifetime of red blood cells ends and the blood cells dissolved themselves like foam. Another reason is that the patients drink large amount of water, which made the urine light with low tension, and then the blood cells will be damaged. No matter how, occult blood is the same with hematuria(Hematuria and Kidney Disease), and they both are the symptoms of disease. We should not neglect it.
For the causes of occult blood, they can be attributed to the following three causes:
Inflammation, stones and tumour. For the inflammation, they may be glomerulonephritis, pyelonephritis, cystitis and so on. For the stones, they may be the renal stones, ureteral stones and bladder stones and so on. And there also are other conditions, such as menstrual cycle of female patients and constipation and so on.
However, the serious case is the occult blood cause by tumor, such as benign and malignant tumor of kidney, bladder and ureter. Of course, for some aged male patients, they have the symptom of occult blood because of behign prostate hypertrophy, increase of residual urine and so on. Indeed, the behign prostate hypertrophy also belongs to tumor. It is a kind of tumor on the prostate and get large because of the hyperplasia.
Besides for the occult blood, we should also consider about the age and genders. For the young female patients, if they found the occult blood in the test, except the clinical symptoms, we also need to consider whether she is in the menstrual cycle and cystitis is another common reason. For the male patients in 30s or 40s, if there is no obvious inflammation symptom, we should consider about to recommend the patients to take a X ray of KUB to test whether there are stones. For the elder male patients, the prostatic hyperplasia should be a main factor needs to be considered. And then we should take the test of intraveneous pyelography or ultrasonic test to test whether there is tumor.
In addition, patients had better to take a urine cytology. By this test, we can find whether there are malignant cells. if all the test of X-ray Inspection, ultrasonic test and urine cytology are normal, the patients had better to take the cystourethroscopy. And if this test is also normal, we usually called this occult blood as benign occult blood of unidentifiable cause.

No matter how, hope the patients to timely treatment and take regular test in order to keep healthy.