Talk About test for kidney status?

My doctor is specifically worried about my GFR. I found the calculator online. It appears to be a statistic. It is based on certain probablistic figures based on your gender, race, and age. The only thing you plug in is your creatinine score, and I got the same score that is on my doctor's report. Now, I'm an active 53 year old in reasonably good physical shape, and if I plug in Black for my race instead of white, my GFR doubles. White women must be a pretty useless group of people, because even when I changed my age to 40, my GFR didn't greatly change. They're saying that even at fairly young ages we have no muscle and do no activity, relative to any other group of people.

That score isn't reliable at all, because you have to be close to the statistical norm for your age group for it to mean anything, in terms of muscle mass, activity and diet.

Black women do have GFR's that run differently than other people, possibly because they're more muscular and less useless. My doctor thinks it's a genetic metabolic difference, adn as she and I both realized when we discussed it, I have some Black ancestry! I mean, racial groups aren't all that distinct and never have been. I have considerable North African ancestry that fed into my Germantown founder lines in late 17th century southeastern PEnnsylvania, and a Mulatto ancestor from 18th century New England, who pretended to be from "Dos Azores". If you have ancestry from Flanders or Holland, some of it is likely to be Black, and it was very common in New England for mulattos who could pass to pretend to be Caribbean and start over.

Yours,Dora SmithAustin, TX