unpopular opinion: most of what gets said here about eGFR is guesswork
unpopular opinion: most of what gets said here about eGFR is guesswork. I have gone back and forth on this for months.
How to make a panel worth comparing, which is most of the value people leave on the table.
Standardise the conditions: same lab, same fasting state, same rough time of day, same point in the week, similar hydration. Take a baseline before you change anything. Repeat any surprising value before acting on it. Change one thing at a time if you want to attribute anything to it.
Do that and a year of panels is a trend. Skip it and a year of panels is a collection of unrelated mornings, which is what most of the alarmed posts here are actually describing.
Brought the whole set to my clinician rather than one flagged value. Completely different conversation.
Tracked eGFR against the weight trend for a year. The correlation was much weaker than I expected and that was worth knowing.
Corrections welcome, especially the pedantic ones. Pedantry is how this board earns its reputation.
best — the order this archive was captured in
ApoB counts atherogenic particles rather than the cholesterol they carry, which is why it can diverge from LDL-C and why it is the addition most worth making.
Took a baseline the week before starting purely because this board told me to. Best five minutes I have spent on this.
one measurement is a point, two is a line, three is a trend
ask whether the lab changed its assay between your two draws
Push back: a value just outside a reference interval is a common finding in healthy people. It is a reason to repeat.
nothing on this board interprets your results for you
ApoB is the one worth adding if you only add one
Why so many single values look alarming and turn out to be nothing.
A reference interval is built to contain about 95% of a healthy reference population, so one test in twenty falls outside one by construction. Add biological variation, assay imprecision, fasting state and time of day, and a genuinely stable person will produce occasional out-of-range results.
That is why repeat testing before acting is standard. Regression to the mean handles most of it. None of which means an out-of-range value should be ignored — it means it should be repeated and taken to somebody who can put it in context, which is emphatically not a ranked feed.
[deleted]
Same lab as the previous draw?
bring the numbers to someone qualified to read them
Draw at the same point in the week now, fasting, same lab. The noise dropped enormously once I standardised.
- 1ApoB counts atherogenic particles rather than the cholesterol they carry,…6 comments in this branch · started by u/greta_chukwu