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Clinical & Lifestyle

Kidney function, body surface area, and blood alcohol — measures that come from a lab report or a clinical setting rather than a gym.

Four calculators for numbers that arrive from somewhere other than a gym: a lab report, a drug label, an oncology dose sheet, a legal limit.

What they have in common is that each one is easy to compute and easy to misread. The arithmetic is the small part; what the number does and does not license is the rest of the page.

Which one for which question

What each clinical and lifestyle calculator answers.
QuestionUseBased on
What does my kidney result mean?GFRCKD-EPI 2021, race-free
What is my body surface area?Body Surface AreaMosteller, Du Bois and six more
What shape are my measurements?Body TypeFFIT circumference thresholds
How does alcohol clear my system?Blood AlcoholWidmark with Watson body water

A number from a lab is not a diagnosis

Every equation on these pages was fitted to a population and then applied to an individual, and the gap between those two things is where the misreading happens. An eGFR of 58 is not a disease; it is one reading, on one day, from one marker that also moves with muscle mass and what you had for dinner. Chronic kidney disease requires the change to persist for three months, and usually a second marker alongside it.

None of these replace a clinician

These calculators reproduce published equations so you can understand a result you have already been given. They cannot examine you, they do not know your history or your medications, and they should never be the reason you start, stop or change a treatment.

Why the race coefficient is gone

Until recently, eGFR equations applied a multiplier that raised the reported figure for Black patients — an artefact of population averages in the original cohorts, treated as biology. In practice it made kidney function look better than it was, delaying referral, specialist care and transplant waitlisting.

In 2021 a joint task force of the National Kidney Foundation and the American Society of Nephrology recommended a refit equation with race removed entirely. That is the equation used here, and there is no race input on the page.

Frequently asked questions

Most often because your lab still reports the older 2009 equation, or because it caps the reported value at 60 or 90 rather than printing an exact figure. Check which equation the report names. If it is CKD-EPI 2021 and the numbers still differ, confirm the creatinine units — mg/dL and µmol/L differ by a factor of 88.4.

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