A friend-of-a-friend (let’s call her F) has an ex-husband and a couple of kids by him. They share custody. The ex has had problems with drugs in the past. He is currently being regularly tested for drugs at work with urine tests.
Recently, F’s son, age 10, has made several references to daddy having him pee in a jar. Naturally, F is concerned that the ex is using drugs again and using the child’s urine for the test.
Which raised the question–is it possible to do a test on a urine sample to determine the (approximate) age of the person who produced it? Could they at least tell the difference between urine produced by a grown adult and prepubescent child?
Note: F is addressing her concerns through other channels. This question is just out of curiosity.
But additional tests could be performed on the urine.
I’m sure I’ve seen urine tested for gender on various police procedural TV shows–not that that is proof that such a test exists!
ETA–In this case, a test for the age of the donor needn’t be conclusive or anything. Just enough to raise a red flag and compel more accurate testing. (again, this is hypothetical anyway)
No, usually if they TV show needs to prove that the urine came from a female instead of a male they find some pregnancy indicators in the urine, and thats how he gets busted.
Putting it in a condom and taping it to your leg was the trick I always heard for keeping the temprature correct.
If I were “F” I would try one of two things. Either keep the kids on the day of (and before) a UA, OR call the testing facility and let them know of your concerns and let them deal with it from there.
They can test urine for hormones, including testosterone. Theoretically at least a 10 year old boy would have lower testosterone levels than an adult male.
But no one’s going to test his urine for testosterone, unless his work is concerned about steroid use.
You are absolutely right. Since urine contains at least a few cells (white blood cells or kidney/bladder cells), it would be a very simple matter for someone to determine gender from a urine sample (as long as they had the appropriate technology).
Although, as you say, gender testing could be done by looking for the ‘Y’ chromosome or its absence, nowadays it might even be easier just to use PCR to identify key segments of the ‘Y’ chromosome. That would certainly be more sensitive than looking for whole ‘Y’ chromosomes.
This is probably referring to the routine “off the shelf” tests. Again, there is no do doubt whatsoever that gender can be determined on urine, or for that matter, on any human material so long as it contains some cells.
I suppose it’s theoretically possible that urine may not contain sufficient cells to allow for gender testing. However, as you’ve probably heard and read about, it’s now possible to do “DNA analysis” on absolutely miniscule quantities of tissue (made possible through PCR). It’s not much of a stretch to say that even a single cell is enough to allow such testing. Hence, so long as there’s even a few cells in the urine (and there will “always” be at least some cells there), then DNA testing, including gender determination, will be possible.
As KarlGauss says, absolutely it *can *be done. *Will it be done as part of a routine drug test for most employers? No way. Perhaps if the guy is working a high security clearance job in the Pentagon, but if he’s tossing boxes around at the local WalMart, they’re not paying for anything more than the basic pot/coke/meth screen.
Just some additional details that I didn’t want to muck up the OP with–given the ex’s past drug use, there is a social service worker of some sort involved here. It was the social service person who noticed the child saying things that suggested that this might be going on. The social service person asked F if she had ever heard the child saying anything along those lines. And F was like “well, now that you mention it…” So the social service person is doing a little investigating to see if she can figure out if something is amiss. If so, then she is going to see about compelling drug testing that is less easily falsified.
But you can see why the “could they just test the urine sample for the age of the donor” question came up.
