Hormone panel changes — what worked for you?

Dr.MetabolicMD said:

A defensible baseline is short: HbA1c and fasting glucose, a lipid panel with ApoB if you can get it, ALT and AST, creatinine with eGFR, TSH, ferritin…

I read this differently from Dr.MetabolicMD, on substance rather than tone. I would drop the "get everything" instinct further than this thread does. Every extra test is another chance at a false positive, and incidental findings have their own cost in scans, biopsies and worry.

Adding the numbers, since they settle part of this. Post reference ranges alongside numbers when you share them. Units differ by country — glucose and lipids especially — and half the confusion in these threads is unit mismatch rather than disagreement.

KevinCompounds said:

I would drop the "get everything" instinct further than this thread does.

Coming at KevinCompounds’s question from a different direction. The single most useful discipline is bringing the whole panel to a clinician rather than one flagged value. One out-of-range result in isolation generates anxiety and unnecessary tests; the same result next to the trend and the rest of the panel usually generates a shrug.

One thing that is still open after Dr.GutHealth’s answer:

How often to repeat it, because quarterly seems to be the convention and I cannot find the reasoning?

Closing the loop on my own question.

Took the whole panel in rather than the one flagged line, and the conversation lasted two minutes instead of generating three more tests.