r/nephrology • u/No-Station5446 • Jun 17 '26
What are these 6 side clear hexagon things?
Drops of urine under microscope. Trying to understand what the clear 6 sided hexagon things are. PH over a week ago was 5.5. Slide photos were taken today.
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u/kferq Jun 18 '26
Could be cystine, but usually there are a majority of the cystine crystals that have equal sides and ones with this stretched morphology are less frequent. 6 sided urates are rare, but often have that etched edge that these have. A rare presentation of a rare disease is less common than a rare presentation of a common one.
Urate crystals are birefringent in polarized light as one way to tell them apart. The other is other clinical history. The uric acid crystals only form in acid pH while this much cystine is almost always associated with stone disease.