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Health and medicine
Course: Health and medicine > Unit 1
Lesson 10: Urinary system introduction- Meet the kidneys!
- Kidney function and anatomy
- Glomerular filtration in the nephron
- Changing glomerular filtration rate
- Countercurrent multiplication in the kidney
- Urination
- The kidney and nephron
- Secondary active transport in the nephron
- Introductory urinary system quiz
- Intermediate urinary system quiz
- Advanced urinary system quiz
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Urination
Micturition (peeing) starts with urine flowing from the kidneys to the bladder via ureters. The bladder expands using transitional epithelium. Urine exits through the urethra, controlled by internal and external urethral sphincters. Ureters prevent backflow, thereby reducing infection risk. Created by Raja Narayan.
Want to join the conversation?
- How exactly does caffeine encourage urination? Does it cause more urea to be collected in the calyces?(16 votes)
- Caffeine is a diuretic that, through a signaling cascade and participation in RAAS through increasing levels of free adenosine by blocking the adenosine receptor (same reason it wake you up), leads to increased water excretion and salt excretion. Not sure if the videos on this website discuss RAAS but if you are interested in renal physiology you need to cover it.(18 votes)
- Is it dangerous to hold urine in for a long time? Beyond the point that you know you really have to go!(13 votes)
- nope your splincher muscles will open and release the urine and you will mess(5 votes)
- In elderly persons, you often see loss of bladder control. Does that have to do with sphincters not working properly?(8 votes)
- To my knowledge, thats exactly what happens when people become older. Those muscles are weaker as time passes on. It's the same with poop as well, since there are sphincter muscles there too.(7 votes)
- I don't understand the function of internal urethral sphincter?
if it works involuntarily , so how we control our urination?
does External Urethral Sphincter have any correlation with Internal urethral sphincter?(6 votes)- The external urethral sphincter is under conscious control because it is skeletal muscle. So that is how urination is consciously controlled.(4 votes)
- What does it mean when someone makes a bag out of a pigs bladder??(5 votes)
- I have heard that cranberries and products made with cranberries can help prevent UTIs, is this true and if so than how?(5 votes)
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3370320/
Cranberries help prevent the typical bacteria, E.coli, from attaching to the bladder wall with their fimbriae and starting an infection. However, cranberry pills are concentrated and may be more effective then drinking juice, although they are a food supplement and do not have to conform to any requirements by the food and drug administration. Other suggestions may also be helpful such as frequent urination to flush out the urethra and prevent e. coli from getting in to the bladder.
https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/tc/urinary-tract-infections-in-teens-and-adults-prevention(3 votes)
- "Guys, I need to go have some micturition." -Somebody who probably watched this video(5 votes)
- oh wow. never knew there was a video about "pee"(3 votes)
- Yes Khan Academy has made a pee video(1 vote)
- How come you can hold it all night when you're sleeping but not all day when you are awake?
Is it because you are at rest and your body is not moving, so your blood is not going fast in your body?(1 vote)- Some people do, some people don't (Google it - there are people who get up multiple times at night). But I assume that when you sleep you feel less, and obviously, you have less water to hold because you don't drink any when you're asleep.(2 votes)
- How do you know if you have one kidney or two(1 vote)
- A traditional human body has a left and right kidney. But I'm not sure if you would know if one is missing.....(2 votes)
Video transcript
Voiceover: Next time you're
with a group of friends, and you have to go pee, be a little fancy. Stand up and announce to them that I must now undergo micturition. Micturition, which is a fancy phrase for "to pee," or "to urinate." And so in this video
we're gonna talk about the process of micturition. Beginning where we left off in the kidney, after we concentrate
urine in our nephrons, we have this part that
sort of touches the tip of the renal medulla, that's our renal calyx. Our renal calyx will be the
part to first collect urine from the collecting tubules,
and we said several renal calyces coalesce
together into the renal pelvis, so that's the renal pelvis
right there, and then the renal pelvis itself leaves
the kidney through this tube called the ureter, and we've
got two ureters right there. The ureter then conducts
our urine inferiorly, or towards our feet, by
connecting into the bladder. And note that these dotted lines imply that the ureter's attached to the back, or the posterior aspect of the bladder. So our ureters are like a one-way street, because they have valves that prevent backflow of urine upwards. That means that the
urine will only flow down towards your feet, but there are certainly some exceptions to this,
which I encourage you then to think about what can happen. What could happen if you
allow urine to sort of flow backwards instead of in one direction towards the loo, or the toilet, and we'll talk about that
in a minute, but for now, from our ureter our urine
makes it into the bladder that I've drawn right
here, and you can see it from the front like this,
but it may be useful to take a look at it from the side. So if I say this is the top, and then the bottom is over here,
and our anterior side, or the front on this side,
and our posterior aspect, or the back on this side, our
bladder would look like this. We'd have this top right here,
and then kind of spin down, like so, and this front
part right here would be kind of pointy, and so this
comes down and collects here. And don't forget that
our ureters conduct urine to the back right there,
so we can draw two of them, these guys right there, and
this is our posterior aspect, and the fancy thing about our
bladder is that it's lined with something that's called
transitional epithelium, which is something like
what you've heard of before. You may have heard of squamous epithelium, which is just flat epithelial cells, or columnar epithelium,
which are taller cells. Transitional just means
they're somewhere in between. And the reason why we do this, is because it allows
the bladder to expand. Remember, the bladder is going
to be filling up with urine, and holding onto it, until we're at an appropriate place
to go to the bathroom. So until then, our transitional epithelium allows our bladder to fill up and hold about 300 to 500 milliliters of urine, which is about the volume
of a tall bottle of water. This then leads to a
structure down here, and I'll draw going that-a-way,
and I'll draw it here as well. That goes straight into the loo. This final part of our urinary
tract is called the urethra. And we don't just have
urine leak from the bladder and go straight into the urethra. There's some control here
at the neck of the bladder. Right about there, we have
what's called the internal, because it's deep inside
us, the internal urethral, because it surrounds
the urethra, sphincter. That's the internal
urethral sphincter, and it's just a circle of muscle, that
is not under our control, but it makes sure that the
bladder keeps urine within it, and doesn't leak out urine,
unless it's really full. And so we don't have control over the internal urethral sphincter. So if you were to guess
what type of muscle this is, I'm sure you'd say, this
certainly is going to be smooth muscle, because it's
involuntarily controlled. And just for reference,
that sits about right there. So that's going to be our
internal urethral sphincter. So now that we've covered the bladder, I think this would be a good opportunity to take a look at a
video, within this video, that shows how the ureters
spray urine into the bladder. We call this a ureter jet, and sometimes you can see this on ultrasound, like here. I've oriented the ultrasound
like this, so you can kind of take a look at
the top, and the bottom of the bladder, but some
of the rest of this image may be a little different,
but just focus on the bladder for right now, and let's play this video. Oh, and I should mention
that this thing right here tells you how much flow that you have, so notice whenever you see
anything in yellow or orange, that just means that's urine that's being ejected into the bladder. So as I press play, notice that we have one stream that fires
in, that's one ureter. And then when that stops,
we're very lucky to see another ureter right there fire
some urine into our bladder. I got this video from one of my mentors. Dr. John Fox was very
nice to lend me this. Going back to the cartoon
world that we have here, we can focus on what happens once urine leaves the bladder
and goes into the urethra. The urethra will conduct
urine to the outside world, and that's the organ that we
use to pee away our urine, but the path from the
bladder to the bathroom is very different if we're
talking about men versus women. So I've got this female
bladder right here, that's going to lead
into a female urethra, that we're going to talk about, and I'm gonna contrast
that with the male urethra. Now to be complete, the female urethra has sort of the same
set-up as the male urethra. It leads out of the body, and has its own internal urethral
sphincter right up there. And then there's a part of the urethra that happens afterwards
right here that's called the membranous urethra,
so membranous because we pass though a membrane, or a sheet that circles the urethra, and so we already talked about something that circles the urethra
already, and that's kind of right above the structure
I'm drawing in right now. We had the internal
urethral sphincter that was circling our urethra at
the neck of the bladder. Down here, this membrane, or this sheet that we have sort of circling our urethra is the external urethral sphincter. And because it's external,
and it's something that WE control, this is going to
be made up of skeletal muscle. And this is what we learn to
control through potty training. Now to contrast that
with the male situation, we don't go directly into
the membranous urethra. No, instead we have a
portion that's called the prostatic urethra, because we pass through an organ
called the prostate. It's not directly involved
in the urinary system, but it circumscribes
the urethra right there. After the prostatic urethra, then we have the membranous urethra. So that's the part that's the same as what we've got in women. So we have our membranous
urethra, and of course, in dudes, we've also got this sheet, or this muscle that's surrounding our
urethra here, that's our external urethral sphincter
that's under voluntary control because it's skeletal
muscle, and then from there, we lead into what's
called the spongy urethra. The spongy urethra is just
the part of the urethra that's in the penis. So that's in the penis, and
then afterwards, the urine leaves the body, and it's
out in the external world. This entire system right here is in contact with the
external environment. Now as you may have guessed, women don't have a spongy urethra. So what happens after
the membranous urethra is actually kind of short-lived. This is actually going to be pretty short in comparison to the male urethra, so the connection to the outside
world is a little more direct in females than it is in men. Now this kind of goes back to that comment I made earlier about backflow. We make sure that our
valves here in the ureter makes urine go in one direction, to the bladder, and then
we're gonna go out this way. But if we don't have valves,
and we do have backflow, we can end up having what's called stasis, or urine just kind of hanging out up here, or maybe up in the kidney
for a long period of time. Now that can be problematic,
especially because we're in contact with
the external environment, and you know that there
are things like bacteria, and viruses, and fungi that
can cause an infection. So if we have stasis right here, I'll just write a little telephone pole right there, stasis right there, we may have
a greater risk of infection, because one of the functions
of urinating is also to dispel bacteria that may
have made it up the urethra from contact with the
external environment. So we have a greater risk of
infection if we have backflow, and we have a greater risk
of infection if we have a shorter urethra, which
is what happens in females. And that's the whole reason
why women tend to have more urinary tract infections,
so I'll write that down, that's a urinary tract infection, a UTI. They happen more so in
women than they do in men because women have a shorter urethra. Either way, the urine
makes it out of the body, goes into the loo, and
effectively discards the waste products that
we've made in our body, that we've filtered and
concentrated in our kidneys.