Must Read: What Your Urine Can Tell About Your Health

The crazy—and creepy—things your urine could soon reveal about your health.
Consider this the next time you’re about to flush—you may be sending important health information down the toilet. We’re not advising a return to the old summer camp rule or anything (if it’s yellow…), but we do humbly suggest you give your urine a little more respect.
Why? Because we’re approaching a golden age of urine testing, thanks in part to a project called the Human Urine Metabolome, a recently completed analysis of more than 3,000 chemicals and compounds in liquid waste (a veritable encyclopedia of pee). “Instead of looking at urine through a keyhole, we’re now looking through a picture window,” says David Wishart, PhD, the University of Alberta scientist leading the project. In the next decade or so, Dr. Wishart predicts we may all have home testing kits that read our bodily fluids to foretell the risk of diseases such as cancer and diabetes.

Here are six surprising things your urine could soon be saying about your health.

1. Breast cancer

Mammograms aren’t going away—but soon, your doctor may first run a pee test to look for malignancies in your breasts. Researchers at the Missouri University of Science and Technology are actively recruiting clinical trial participants to validate the test, which looks for metabolites called pteridines in urine. All humans excrete some pteridines, but levels rise in cancer patients; scanning for them could unmask tumors even before they appear on a mammogram, and also tell doctors the stage to which cancer has advanced.

2. Blood clots

Right now, when patients have symptoms or risk factors for potentially deadly blood clots—such as chest pain or extended bed rest after surgery—doctors detect clots either through imprecise blood tests or expensive imaging. But that may soon change: Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a urine test that can reveal hidden clots. A company developing the test will launch from MIT next year, and co-creators Kevin Lin and Gabe Kwong, PhD, say they’re working on a paper-strip version that could be used at home like a pregnancy test.

3. BPA (bisphenol A)

Sifting through someone’s trash can tell you a lot about a person, from what they eat to how often they order shoes online. Similarly, pee serves as a revealing part of the body’s waste disposal system. “Urine contains a lot of what the body is trying to get rid of, including excesses of toxins or drugs or nutrients,” Dr. Wishart says. That’s one reason why, when public health experts want to gauge a population’s exposure to a substance like BPA, they ask for urine samples. And in case you were wondering, the most recent analysis revealed measureable amounts of BPA—which has been linked to health issues such as asthma, developmental problems, and heart disease—in nearly every American’s urine.

4. Potential therapies for cancer and other diseases

In future decades, urinary stem-cell transplants could provide a rapidly regenerating source of material to heal damaged tissue throughout the body. Already, scientists at Wake Forest University have isolated stem cells in urine and, using existing tissue as a kind of scaffolding, directed them to develop into smooth-muscle cells and other types of bladder cells. With a little more coaxing, they could potentially transform into bone, nerve, muscle, and other types of cells. And because urinary stem cells come from a patient’s own body, they don’t run the same risk of rejection as transplants from embryonic stem cells.

5. Colon polyps

Detecting colon cancer without a colonoscopy? Sign us up. Based on research done at the University of Alberta, a Canadian company called Metabolomic Technologies Inc. plans to market a urine test for colon polyps as early as next year. Of course, if the test came back positive, you’d still need a more invasive procedure to confirm the results and remove precancerous growths. But the urine screening would offer an easy, inexpensive way to make sure the people who need colonoscopies the most receive them, Dr. Wishart says.

6. How long you’ll live

People with high-protein pee—typically a sign of kidney disease—die about seven to eight years earlier than those with normal levels, according to a study published earlier this year in the American Journal of Kidney Diseases. “Proteins from the blood can leak into the urine when the filters of the kidney are damaged,” says study author Tanvir Chowdhury Turin, PhD, of the University of Calgary. Turin recommends anyone with risk factors for kidney disease, such as diabetes or high blood pressure, undergo yearly testing for urine proteins.