Lipid panel improvements mega-thread — my results so far

DanielChem_CHI 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…

Pushing back on DanielChem_CHI here. 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.

Worth separating that from the lipid panel, which this thread keeps folding into the same question. They behave differently and the advice does not transfer.

Ask again with the specifics and you will get a better answer than this one.

sophie_paris said:

I got a full panel before starting and a repeat at three months, and the second one is more useful than the first purely because I now have something…

Blood work came back perfect. baseline bloodwork + this community = winning. 🏆

PharmD_Rodriguez said:

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

There is a second half to this that has not been said yet. ApoB is the more informative number and it is cheap. LDL-C estimates cholesterol mass in atherogenic particles; ApoB counts the particles, and it is particle count that tracks risk — which is why the two can disagree and why the disagreement is the clinically interesting case. Triglycerides fall substantially with weight loss and improved insulin sensitivity, HDL moves modestly, and LDL-C often barely moves at all, which surprises people who expected everything to improve together.

Following on from HealthEcon_DC — and this may be the naive question:

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

Reporting back.

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