Question: why do you spin wee and look at cervix?

Sandra Phinbow answered on 11 Mar 2013:

Hi, we spin the wee because what we want to look at most carefully are cells that might be in the wee. So what we need to do it concentrate those cells and get rid of any watery stuff we dont need.

Do you know what a centrifuge is? A centrifuge is a spinning machine that can spin a tube of fluid super fast, many thousands of times per minute, and what this does is sends the heavy cells to the bottom of the tube and the fluid stays on top. It seperates the two out.

Then after it’s finished spinning, we can pour off the watery stuff that we dont need. And what’s left in the tube is cells (if there are any, we dont always get cells).

So then we add a little bit of preservative to the cells and spin it again, and this time the cells are spun straight onto a microscope slide. After that, we add some dye, and we’re able to look at them under the microscope.

So basically we spin wee to be able to look at any cells that are in the wee, without having any gunk that we dont want to see. And by looking at the cells we can tell why someone is having problems weeing or if they have blood in their wee, or if they cancer in their bladder.

Looking at the cervix is a a similar thing. Cells are taking from the cervix by using a special brush, and those cells are put into a preservative, and they also get spun on a machine and dye is also added. And again these are put on a microscope slide so we can look at them.

We look at them because we have too see if there cells are normal and healthy for the lady patient. Or if they are not, then we can see that the cells dont look right, and we can arrange for the lady to see a special doctor who specialises in the female gential tract.

By monitoring healthy women in the population, we can detect early any problems in the cervix before anything unhealthy might happen. If there are any problems and the cervical cells are not looked at then a women might not know that she has abnormal cells, or possibly even cancer.

This is called ‘screening’. It doesnt need to happen often, just once every 3 or 5 years is enough.