baseline labs: the version I wish someone had shown me in week 1
baseline labs: the version I wish someone had shown me in week 1. Posting the boring middle of the process, because the internet is full of the start and the end and nothing else.
Nobody here can interpret your panel and this comment is not doing so. What a board can usefully do is help you ask better questions of somebody who can.
Repeat testing before acting is standard practice for a reason: regression to the mean does a lot of work on single outlying values.
That is everything I have. The rest is opinion and I have tried to keep it out.
best — the order this archive was captured in
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.
Careful — that is a question for whoever ordered the panel, and nobody in this thread can answer it responsibly.
Draw at the same point in the week now, fasting, same lab. The noise dropped enormously once I standardised.
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.
Substantial weight loss independently moves lipids, liver enzymes and several other markers.
flair_enthusiast is right that a reference interval is not a target. It is a description of a population.
Yes — same lab, same fasting state, same rough time of day, or the comparison is doing nothing.
That is a non-fasting value and the interval you are comparing it against is a fasting one.
That is a non-fasting value and the interval you are comparing it against is a fasting one.
Agreed — and standardising the draw conditions is the cheapest improvement available.
Time of day, fasting state, hydration and recent exercise all move common markers. Standardising the draw conditions is free and it removes most of the apparent variability.
hydration status moves a surprising number of markers
Different laboratories use different assay platforms with different calibration. Comparing across labs adds a systematic offset that is invisible on the report.
I would not draw a line through two points, especially when the second was taken at a different time of day.
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