what changed for me between month 10 and month 18
Question in the title, detail here: what changed for me between month 10 and month 18. 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. Different laboratories use different assay…
Repeat testing before acting is standard practice for a reason: regression to the mean does a lot of work on single outlying values.
This. Reference ranges are population intervals, not targets, and conflating them causes a lot of unnecessary alarm here.
Is that the same assay, or did the lab change platforms?
Small fix — a reference interval is not a treatment target, and the post above uses them interchangeably.
Correction: that marker is reported in different units by different labs, which explains the tenfold difference you are seeing.
Added ApoB to the panel after a thread here. It told me something the standard lipid panel had been hiding.
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.
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.
bring the numbers to someone qualified to read them
Agreed on assay changes. A lab switching platforms between your draws is invisible unless you ask.
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
Agreed — and standardising the draw conditions is the cheapest improvement available.
Agreed. The trend is the signal. A single value is a snapshot of one morning.
Cosigning on baseline. The panel I regret most is the one I did not take before starting.