A1C from 7.2 to 5.1 — my bloodwork transformation

PharmD_Rodriguez said:

The single most useful discipline is bringing the whole panel to a clinician rather than one flagged value.

This is where I part company with the consensus forming above. 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 glycaemic control, which this thread keeps folding into the same question. They behave differently and the advice does not transfer.

The figures, for anyone assembling their own picture. Because it is glucose-dependent, this class carries a low intrinsic hypoglycaemia risk on its own — the risk arrives when it is combined with insulin or a sulfonylurea, which usually need reducing.

Dr.NutriCornell 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. HbA1c reflects roughly three months of average glycaemia weighted toward the most recent weeks, which is why repeating it at six weeks tells you very little. The improvement on this class comes from two directions — direct glucose-dependent insulin secretion and glucagon suppression, plus the indirect effect of weight loss on insulin sensitivity — and the second continues after the first has plateaued.

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

What actually belongs on a baseline panel, as opposed to the enormous list that gets pasted around here?

OP back with an update, since a thread like this is useless without one.

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