[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…
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.