Rodriguez-Romero et al.1 draw our attention in their recent article on the importance of studying the renal function of paraplegic patients immediately after sustaining a traumatic spinal cord injury. They have used a rat as an experimental model to study this as they state that: ‘There are reports that show decrease of glomerular filtration rate (GFR) in patients with chronic cord injury. Information on GFR during early stages of SCI is scarce and wrongly based on creatinine measurements which are faulty because they are affected by muscle mass catabolism occurring during this stage of SCI.’

While I would agree that knowledge of renal function in patients with an acute injury of the spinal cord is important, I disagree with their statement that such studies in the early stages of SCI in patients are scarce. While studies based on serum creatinine are faulty, this does not apply where the trouble is taken to perform a full creatinine clearance test. I would draw their attention to the research carried out nearly 60 years ago by Doggart and Silver2 and Doggart et al.,3 in which we compared urea clearance and creatinine clearance following the procedure outlined below:

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