Kidney issues: "slightly high" creatinine, normal BUN

I have a slightly chubby (a bit over 10 lbs/4.7 kg) 11 year old cat who has always had intermittent issues with vomiting (fluctuates from once or twice a month to a few times a week). After flying from California to Germany, she was having more issues than normal (no appetite, intermittent diarrhea, blood on poop probably from anal gland), but after about a month that all calmed down and I took her to the vet for her first ever tooth cleaning. For the next week, diarrhea and vomiting and lots of water drinking and the bloody poop was back. I brought her back to the vet and got a blood test done (I don't think they did one before anesthesia unfortunately) and the result was high creatinine and normal BUN. (The vet didn't seem concerned at all about the poop blood.)

The results were:
Creatinine 172.8 micromol/liter (normal range 0 - 168)
Harnstoff (I'm assuming this is BUN) 8.95 mmol/l (normal range 5 - 11.4)

She also had high eosinophils (which a vet has noted previously, probably from food allergies), basophils, leukocytes, cholesterol, and triglycerides, and low neutrophils and thrombocytes.

The vet wants to try her on a prescription kidney diet, but because of her food allergies I want to stay away from any corn/soy/rice based food. (Current food is grain free fish based kibble, the protein sources in her diet most of her life have been fish and chicken, planning on switching her to lamb or rabbit canned).

My question is, how worried should I be? Could the stress of moving and then anesthesia cause temporarily elevated creatinine or is it a pretty clear sign that her kidney function is starting to decline? Are there any kidney diets that are grain, soy, chicken, and fish free?

The diarrhea and vomiting have cleared up, she does drink a lot of water still though (but I think she always has). She overgrooms her stomach to baldness, but it's impossible to say if it's from stomach or urinary tract pain or just anxiety (she started the overgrooming a few years ago when there was a bluejay nest attracting a neighbor's cat to hang out outside the apartment's main window and never completely stopped).

My cat DeeJay started out with elevated Creatinine levels while the BUN levels were normal about a year ago, now both levels are elevated.  She is in stage 2 kidney disease.  This is a wonder resource on kidney disease in cats.  http://felinecrf.org/    Unfortunately all of the "Kidney Diets" have the ingredients in them that you are wanting to avoid.  My cat DeeJay has allergies too, and does the fur mowing on her stomach as well.    I switched my cat DeeJay to raw and initially it really helped her Kidney values, but she is 15 &1/2 years old so I expected her to progress with the kidney disease.  I make my own food for her I just omit the bones (I add a calcium source) so her diet is low phosphorus. http://feline-nutrition.org/answers/answers-kidney-disease-phosphorus-and-raw-diets   I do know that high protein diets can cause slightly elevated Crea in some cases but usually the BUN will be elevated as well.  Do you have previous blood results on your cat to compare to?

Thanks for the links. I'm working on getting test results from her old vet.

Her diet is pretty high protein (Orijen Six Fish) and she was also probably a bit dehydrated from the vomiting and diarrhea when they took the sample (the vet gave her some saline after taking the sample), that's part of why I'm looking for other opinions on whether her test results could mean anything besides kidney disease.

Did you switch DeeJay to raw when her creatinine results were high, or after the BUN was high too? You said it helped initially, how long?

Did your vet recommend a urinalysis? If not I would request one because a low urine specific gravity is a sure sign of kidney disease/insufficiency.

samus said:

Did you switch DeeJay to raw when her creatinine results were high, or after the BUN was high too? You said it helped initially, how long?

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I switched DeeJay when her Creatinine levels were first high.  My dad is a semi retired vet and I work for a different vet, and I asked his opinion as they wanted me to put her on the Hill's k/d diet, and I already fed my dogs raw, he suggested I feed her raw as the quality of the protein was better and it would tax the kidneys less with processing it.    It brougth her BUN levels down to the normal range.   She has been raw fed for a year, her levels have started to climb again though.  But she is 15 & 1/2 years old so it is to be expected.

The vet didn't say anything about a urinalysis, and I don't want to take her back just for a test since her stomach is back to normal (more or less) and I don't want to cause any undue stress. I'll look into whether it's possible for me to bring in a sample.

The more I'm reading about it, the more I think she's had this problem for a while (vomiting foamy white spit sounds really familiar), and that even if it was the stress and dehydration that caused that test to be high, there probably is an underlying kidney issue to get exacerbated by the stress.

cprcheetah, did DeeJay stop her stomach mowing when you switched to raw? I'm trying to figure out how to judge which foods aren't triggering allergies without having to take her for a blood test every month. Have any recipes you'd recommend?