An electrochemical-based sensor created for creatinine detection
has been developed for early point-of-care (POC) of diagnosis of renal
illnesses. Useful information for the preventive diagnosis and clinical
treatments of congenital disorders of creatinine mechanism, advanced
liver and kidney diseases, and renal dysfunction can be obtained by
the noninvasive evaluation of the creatinine levels in urine. The
direct detection of creatinine can be achieved using the modified
nanocomposite of cuprous nanoparticles encapsulated by polyacrylic
acid (PAA) gel-Cu(II) fabricating on a screen-printed carbon electrode.
Here, we report that the degree of kidney dysfunction failure can
be determined by an amount of Cu(I) bound with the creatinine through
the adsorptive mechanism on the modified electrode. Under cyclic voltammetry
scans, the amount of creatinine was measured from the adsorptive signals
of the redox peak current identifying the Cu(I)–creatinine
complex with a natural logarithm of the creatinine concentration ranging
from 200 μM to 100 mM. For this detection range, the theoretical
calculation was postulated to describe experimental behaviors of the
adsorptive mechanism as creatinine diffused to adsorb on the composite-modified
electrode to reduce oxidized copper nanoparticles and transformed
to Cu(II)–creatinine complexes. Interestingly, there was evidence
that anodic peak potentials had been reduced in magnitudes and shifted
negatively by natural logarithm during the formation of the Cu(I)–creatinine
complex. For practical usage in POC technology, the creatinine detection
in interference was carried out using differential pulse voltammetry
to solely determine faradaic currents of creatinine–copper
formation. With the interference of urea, glucose, ascorbic acid,
glycine, and uric acid in artificial urine, the sensor showed promising
results of the interference-free determination with 99.4% sensitivity
efficiency, whereas for human urine interference, this sensor showed
85% sensitivity efficiency in detecting creatinine. This shows that
this composite-modified sensor (PAA gel-Cu(II)/Cu2O NPs)
has great potential for use in the next-generation devices for creatinine
sensing to determine the progression in kidney dysfunctions.