and the chemical formation of testing urine we have the ability to do that using what's called reagent test strips and the reagent test strips are able to identify specimens in the urine they look like this here and they actually come in a bottle very similar to what you see here notice on the bottle you've got the same squares that you would see on the reagent strip so the bar the outer portion of the bottle is in fact where we would read our results from so with reagent structures testing color changes indicate the presence of a substance as well as its concentration uh as we're comparing the colors of a normal unused reagent strip to a reagent strip that has been dipped and the results are starting to change what we can expect is to see the squares change colors as they change colors they're going to give us results now before we look at those results and how we read that let's talk about the reagent strips and how to care for those they are light sensitive so it's important to make sure that you only retrieve the strip that you're utilizing and you immediately replace the lid you remove the strip just prior to use so we wouldn't want to take these out and have them exposed to fluorescent lighting that could alter the results avoid touching the pads uh check your reagent strips for expiration dates they do expire date new bottles and discard after six months and then follow the reading guidelines they're going to be specific times in which you can read the results follow those guidelines according to the manufacturer of the reagent strips here is an example of The Chemical Testing with a normal reagent strip and the colors that we can expect to see as it changes in results now remember with urine urine is a test that's going to give us qualitative and quantitative results so we can obtain numerical values and results as well as those positive and those negative results example here for leukocytes we know that leukocytes are white blood cells not something that's typically floating around within our body unless there's a purpose so if we see an elevated amount of leukocytes that's going to give us reason to pause because that means that the body is probably uh trying to defend you against some sort of pathogen now notice here with our reagent strip and the negative form this strip has not been used if we were to dip this strip into urine we could expect to see results that resemble these colors here now what you're going to do is you're going to take your strip and you're going to align it with the color that is most represented after you dip this into your urine specimen so let's just say you have a strip here and the color is representative of a small amount of leukocytes you're going to write the number that's associated with the color that you identified on your strip and you're going to document small we would do that for each one of these results notice here for our nitrates they read as of positive or A negative negative means that there's no color change identifiable whereas positive you're going to see these different Hues of pink whichever one is represented on your strip either one of these is going to indicate a positive result where some of these here for instance protein you can see there are distinct color changes in protein results and again whatever color your strip matches up with you're going to write the number that is uh representing that color and those are the results now also here in what we can test in The Chemical Testing you also have time limits here in which you can read the results so when you're reading your results you're going to start from the bottom and you're going to work your way up to the top because we only have about 30 seconds before our glucose will start to change and give us results so after we were to dip our reagent strip into our urine specimen we're going to lay that strip flat and we're going to leave it undisturbed after 30 seconds then we have the ability to go in and be able to determine our glucose results now here it is in the color of a negative and once we dip it into the urine if there are positive readings of glucose we can expect to see a color change here again documenting the number that represents the color that most closely uh shows to what you have on your strip is what you're going to do and that's after 30 seconds once you've done that you're going to work your way up here's your bilirubin we're going to do the same thing for our Ketone specific gravity all the way up to after 120 seconds we can then read our leukocytes