My prescriber ordered three tests and this board recommends about twenty, and I would like to know which of those two lists is right.
The narrow version of the question is how often to repeat it, because quarterly seems to be the convention and I cannot find the reasoning.
I would rather have one careful answer than five confident ones.
This one has a reasonably settled answer, so here it is. 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.
Dr.GutHealth said:The single most useful discipline is bringing the whole panel to a clinician rather than one flagged value.
Agreed, and reference ranges are laboratory-specific. Comparing your number to somebody else's range, or to a screenshot from another country, is how people convince themselves something is wrong.
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Shop Reference StandardsJenPlateau said:My prescriber ordered three tests and this board recommends about twenty, and I would like to know which of those two lists is right.
Same position here, arrived at the long way round. 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 becomes informative again, since it reflects about three months of glycaemia. After the first year, and once doses are stable, annual is reasonable unless something specific is being followed.
Adding the clinical framing, because it changes how the question reads.
PSA: get baseline labs BEFORE starting baseline bloodwork therapy. You need a "before" picture to measure progress. My recommended pre-treatment panel:
Total cost at Quest without insurance: ~$200. Worth every penny for the data.