[Baseline] get these before you start, you cannot go back for them later
get these before you start, you cannot go back for them later. Making the case below, and I expect to lose some of it in the comments.
Added ApoB to the panel after a thread here. It told me something the standard lipid panel had been hiding.
My ApoB moved and I spent a fortnight convinced I knew why. The repeat six weeks later was back in range and I had changed nothing.
Repeat testing before acting is standard practice for a reason: regression to the mean does a lot of work on single outlying values.
Research-use-only material is not approved for human use and nothing here should be read as a recommendation to use it.
best — the order this archive was captured in
The confounding problem, stated plainly, because this board keeps stepping on it.
Substantial weight loss moves lipids, liver enzymes, insulin sensitivity markers and several others in its own right. If you are losing weight while taking something, any change in those markers has at least two candidate explanations and you cannot separate them from your own panel.
What you can do is standardise, take a baseline, keep the series long, and be honest in your posts about what is and is not attributable. The threads that say "this compound did X to my ApoB" almost never have the design to support the claim, mine included.
one measurement is a point, two is a line, three is a trend
What did the repeat show?
Correction: that marker is reported in different units by different labs, which explains the tenfold difference you are seeing.
Panicked about a single result, posted here, got told to repeat it, repeated it, and it was fine.
Substantial weight loss independently moves lipids, liver enzymes and several other markers. Attributing a change to a compound while losing weight is confounded by design.
That comparison crosses two labs with different assays. The difference you are describing may be the method.
ApoB counts atherogenic particles rather than the cholesterol they carry, which is why it can diverge from LDL-C and why it is the addition most worth making.
Why so many single values look alarming and turn out to be nothing.
A reference interval is built to contain about 95% of a healthy reference population, so one test in twenty falls outside one by construction. Add biological variation, assay imprecision, fasting state and time of day, and a genuinely stable person will produce occasional out-of-range results.
That is why repeat testing before acting is standard. Regression to the mean handles most of it. None of which means an out-of-range value should be ignored — it means it should be repeated and taken to somebody who can put it in context, which is emphatically not a ranked feed.
I would not draw a line through two points, especially when the second was taken at a different time of day.
Took a baseline the week before starting purely because this board told me to. Best five minutes I have spent on this.
Brought the whole set to my clinician rather than one flagged value. Completely different conversation.
Push back: a value just outside a reference interval is a common finding in healthy people. It is a reason to repeat.
How to make a panel worth comparing, which is most of the value people leave on the table.
Standardise the conditions: same lab, same fasting state, same rough time of day, same point in the week, similar hydration. Take a baseline before you change anything. Repeat any surprising value before acting on it. Change one thing at a time if you want to attribute anything to it.
Do that and a year of panels is a trend. Skip it and a year of panels is a collection of unrelated mornings, which is what most of the alarmed posts here are actually describing.
lab reference ranges are not treatment targets
Correcting my own comment: the two draws were 19 weeks apart, not the figure I gave earlier.
Reference intervals are typically the central 95% of a reference population. By construction one person in twenty falls outside one on any given test without anything being wrong.
Compared two draws across two labs and spent a week worrying before finding out the assays were different.
weight loss itself moves several of these independently
weight loss itself moves several of these independently
This is the sentence to read before anybody panics about a single value.
How many weeks between the two measurements?
- 1Push back: a value just outside a reference interval is a common finding in…9 comments in this branch · started by u/flair_enthusiast
- 2The confounding problem, stated plainly, because this board keeps stepping…7 comments in this branch · started by u/burned_once_twice