Testing
What can a urine metal test tell you?
EFSA used creatinine-adjusted urine cadmium, with a reference point of 1 µg/g creatinine, as the basis for its cadmium tolerable weekly intake. Urine arsenic needs speciation: in NHANES 2017 to 2018 the total-arsenic 95th percentile was 61.5 µg/L and the inorganic-related sum was 13.4 µg/L. A primary source telling laboratories when to prefer a 24-hour collection over a spot sample was not in this corpus.
What urine can show
EFSA derived a tolerable weekly intake of 2.5 µg/kg body weight from urinary cadmium of 1 µg/g creatinine. EFSA 2009. The NHANES urine cadmium row on the cadmium page is in µg/L, not per gram of creatinine, so it is not that reference point.
The inorganic-related arsenic sum and arsenobetaine are separate CDC analytes. Using total urine arsenic alone counts seafood arsenobetaine. The 2017 to 2018 figures are on the arsenic page. They were read from the saved tables, not from an earlier draft table that did not match those files.
Urine cobalt, chromium, and nickel percentiles are on those metal pages. The corpus did not capture clinical reference ranges for 24-hour urine. Provoked urine, collected after a chelator, is a different test and is graded separately.
Related pages
Sources
Heavy Metal Index
Heavy Metal Index: ICP-MS testing. This Heavy Metal Index URL returned HTTP 200 on 15 October 2026. Figures on this page are not copied from that index. They come from the sources named above.
What's safe to buy
The Heavy Metal Tested and Certified public register listed no licensees on 15 October 2026. That page reported 0 certified brands and 0 certified products, and it stated that no brand has completed the three-lot baseline. A specimen layout on the register is an illustration, not a licensee. This page does not name or rank any brand.
The program states that certification is a measurement of a product against a published limit, not a statement that the product is safe. If a licensee is later listed for this category, it will be on the register.
This page summarizes cited documents. It does not diagnose or prescribe. Reviewed 15 October 2026.