Prediction of creatinine clearance from serum creatinine in spinal cord injury patients

Measured endogenous creatinine clearance (Ccr) was compared with the predicted Ccr in 22 paraplegic, 36 tetraplegic and 11 ambulatory male individuals as well as 11 ambulatory females all of whom had normal renal function. While the predicted and measured values closely matched in the ambulatory patients the predicted values in the spinal cord injured patients consistently exceeded the measured values. It thus appears that the original Cockcroft and Gault formula; (formula; see text) when applied to SCI patients can be misleading. Modification of the original formula using a correction factor of 0.8 in paraplegics and 0.6 in tetraplegics was found to allow prediction of Ccr from age, sex, body weight, and serum creatinine in these patients with reasonable accuracy.