My urine has been very yellow recently. What’s going on?

The urine color is very dark. It is recommended to drink more water and observe the situation.

Ordinary people’s urine color is light yellow. How clear it is when it's cold and how yellow it is when it's hot. This is related to how much you sweat and drink, but it can also change with your diet. If you eat an acidic diet, your urine will be dark in color; if you eat an alkaline diet, your urine will be light in color. Sometimes after taking a few riboflavin tablets orally, the color of urine will turn dark yellow. Changes in urine color like these are extremely short-lived and will resolve on their own quickly.

Yellow-brown urine should be distinguished as bilirubinuria or urocholenuria. Bilirubinuria is often caused by inflammation, tumors, and stones blocking the intrahepatic or extrahepatic bile ducts, causing increased bile duct pressure, bile canaliculi rupture, and bile overflow, causing sodium bilirubin to enter the systemic circulation. When sodium bilirubin exceeds a certain amount, bilirubinuria occurs. Urocholenuria is often caused by liver damage, which causes increased intestinal absorption of urobilinogen and enters the urine, resulting in urocholiduria. Or in patients with hemolytic anemia, after a large number of red blood cells are destroyed, a large amount of urobilinogen is absorbed through the intestinal wall and enters the portal circulation. Because the liver cannot convert too much urobilinogen into bilirubin, urobilinuria also occurs.

But it does not mean that yellow urine means you have hepatitis. First of all, you should consider whether you are not drinking enough water, sweating too much, taking medicine, etc. If you only have yellow urine once or twice and you are not feeling uncomfortable, you don’t need to worry. If your urine is always yellow, you feel tired, have a loss of appetite, etc., you need to go to the hospital for examination in time.