Hormone panel changes — looking for input

amsterdam_pete said:

Quarterly for the first year is convention rather than evidence, and it is defensible for a simple reason: it is roughly the interval over which HbA1c…

Pushing back on amsterdam_pete 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.

One concrete data point for the thread. 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.

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

MikeFit_NJ said:

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

Coming at MikeFit_NJ’s question from a different direction. 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 and B12, and a full blood count. That set catches the things that change, the things that explain symptoms, and the things that alter the prescribing decision. Almost everything else on the long circulating lists is either invariant, uninterpretable without a specific question, or an incidental finding waiting to cause an unnecessary workup.

A narrower follow-up, since the general answer is now clear:

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.