He sleeps more hours than I thought anyone could possibly sleep. When he went to the doctor last year for a check up, the doctor told him he was just getting old. I have made him an appointment with a new doctor. What are some of the blood tests that I should have them run? I would definitely recommend a thorough medical evaluation including laboratory testing. How do I get a copy of article above re. Laboratory Tests, etc. Retired from hospital, not Lab.
Very beneficial information. Please advise, Annie. At the end of the article, before the comments section, you should see a small print icon. If you click it, it should generate a print-friendly version of the article. Hope this helps. Thank you for the valuable information. Do you know if there ya a test to fit sulphur deficiency? The MayoClinic site shows that urine sulfate can be tested as a way to assess protein intake: Sulfate, 24 Hour, Urine.
So educational and helpful with lots of useful info — I printed it out and am going to share it with my PCP! Surely it takes a massive amount of time and diligent research to put together articles like this! Thank you for caring and for your passion and dedication to help those of us who are aging. I wish you much more success in all your pursuits!
Take care! Disappointed that the results were for only 3 of the 7 items you mentioned for Basic Metabolic Panel. With your help, I will now be getting more involved in my own health care. I will be requesting more tests. It has actually become more common for health providers to order just a few of the basic metabolic panel items.
In the future, you could ask your provider to explain what is being ordered and why, at the time you get the requisition. Why not include it? There have been numerous studies looking at the risk for heart attack and stroke that have included measurements of Lp-PLA2 and results have been conflicting. It is not known whether Lp-PLA2 contributes in some way to the development of heart disease and stroke, or just happens to be elevated in some individuals who have a higher risk of those events for some other reason.
If a doctor suggests a PLAC test, it is worth a discussion to clarify how the test will provide additional information that might be important for your particular health care journey. Do you use a table of geriatric normal values? I looked up geriatric normal values on line and found these to be completely normal. You make a great point about considering lab results in the context of the person, not just the number! Kidney function tests are a great example of that.
Kidney function does go down with age, almost universally, so the tests that we use to measure and define kidney function tend to be less accurate in older adults.
On top of that, older adults are different from each other just as much as they are different from younger adults for example an older adult with a low muscle mass would have a different calculated GFR than an older adult with a higher muscle mass. Thanks so much for your expert advice.
I wish my doc was half as caring as you are Dr. Sincerely Chas. I am a retired Family Practice physician…90 years old. I have been trying to find a Geriatrician in the San Diego area, but have been unable to find one who is taking new patients.
I will continue to search. Your article on understanding your lab work is excellent. Thank you for such clear explanations. Sorry you are having trouble finding a geriatrician though! I have all my suggestions here: How to find geriatric care — or a medication review — near you.
Good luck and I hope you find a suitable provider soon. Thank you so much for providing your expertise on how to treat and care for older adults. The information you provide are easy to follow and help me understand the importance of how to manage my own health, health of my family and friends in the community. I thought that HIPA mandates them to be released free of charge. What can I do? Hi Eric. However, it appears that you cannot be denied access to the record if you are unable to pay.
At 84 had been feeling fine and very active. Started having bicep pain. He did blood work which was fine except for sed of If all blood work was normal could I be having celiac symptoms. Thought it maybe fibromyalgia but I feel so awful like a truck r n over me. Thank you for any response you may give. Hi Nancy, and sorry to hear about your difficulties. I am not sure if I follow your story, but it sounds like your doctor was considering a diagnosis of Polymyalgia Rheumatica, or PMR, which is different from fibromyalgia, and is treated with prednisone.
The symptoms you describe could be related to a lot of different disorders, and celiac disease would probably not be at the top of the list. I hope you feel better soon and have plans to follow up with your doctor. My mother is on coumadin, metoprolol and cartia all for afib. Her BP is normal and her last blood work done 3 months ago was perfect. Her doctor is ordering blood work again and requesting that she come in for 3 month visits.
Money is a concern and we are trying to stretch what she has as long as possible. In your opinion, are 3 month intervals for blood work without any concerns from the doctor reasonable? Hi Mary. You probably know that warfarin is a blood thinner, which many older adults are taking to prevent a stroke related to atrial fibrillation irregular heartbeat , or because of a blood clot in a vein or the lung, or some other reason.
Warfarin is tricky because its effectiveness can be affected by certain foods, other meds, and other medical conditions, so monitoring is pretty important and is done by way of a blood test. However, some people on warfarin can swap it for a newer type of medication, a direct oral anticoagulant DOAC which may require less monitoring.
This might be worth finding out. Hello, my year-old mother was just diagnosed with osteoporosis via DXA. Her provider did not order any bloodwork. Her level was 10 should be , so she has been prescribed high doses until her 3-month re-check. Are there other labs you would suggest that relate to bone health? In Canada, where I practice, the latest clinical practice guidelines recommendation for additional bloodwork is not strong Grade D and is only for individuals who may be at risk of so called secondary causes of bone loss.
The additional blood work could include: Calcium, corrected for albumin, Complete blood count, Creatinine, Alkaline phosphatase, Thyroid-stimulating hormone, and Serum protein electrophoresis for patients with vertebral fractures.
My np said it is normal. Hello, Curious, my blood work came back with some changes although I do have some previous health issues they have pretty much always came back normal. Should once you change your diet and go off some things you were on before per Dr. Should you get a retest on your blood work before going to another specialist?
Just curious and how long should you wait before getting follow up blood work? Thank you very much. Dietary and medication changes can definitely affect the results of blood tests. Some specialists will request specific tests be done ahead of the consultation visit so it may be helpful to call ahead and find out if this is a part of the intake process. My year-old mother has severe COPD and is also on warfarin.
We just got her up and running on MyChart. Despite having routine doctor visits to lung, heart, and primary doctors, no CBC test has been ordered or given in more than four years. When an individual is taking warfarin, some regular bloodwork is usually important, as you mention.
Usually an INR is done every 1 — 3 months in stable individuals. But exhaustion can be related to many other conditions as well. This imbalance is understandable; young people are not inclined to dwell on illnesses and other medical conditions they are not likely to encounter for a while anyway.
However it was suggested that society is moving ever closer to a medical monitoring format with an increasing bias to early detection. With this in mind we considered the possibility of encouraging young people to take an initial blood test as an introduction to PPG membership.
There seems to be several advantages to this idea:. So, if I understand your comment — the thought is to encourage enrollment in a Patient Participation Group by offering a blood test as an incentive? Is this a form of rostering patients to a particular group of health care providers, or is it more of a patient advisory group? I would want to be clear about how a person benefits from having a blood test, unless there is a condition that is fairly highly prevalent in your population, detectable by a blood test, and treatable.
Needless blood work is never really a good idea, can be costly and burdensome and not completely without risk. In preparing this answer, I found this article about patients who ask for blood test when they are well. These authors point out that patients often come to rely on blood tests as external validation of their behaviour or health status, or do the tests out of fear or an expectation that blood tests should be done routinely, which is not supported by evidence.
Thank you for taking the time to respond to my enquiry and providing an extensive article relating to the subject of unwarranted blood tests. My interest in this matter stems, as I mentioned in my earlier message, from an interest in recruiting young members to our Patients Participation Group PPG which, along with all other General Practices is a national requirement under the UK NHS institution — I refer to the NHS in this way because it is a revered establishment rather than an enterprise in the commercial sense.
Certainly since the outbreak of Covid, and even before then, attention was being influenced by the advent of digitalised health care and its ability to enable a much greater range of activities, from diagnosis, prescriptive medicine, prognosis through to treatment — not to mention the benefits of greater and rapid access to more accurate and influential data.
The benefits of these advances has enabled far reaching changes to be introduced in how General Practice and Clinical Care is organised and managed — including Social Care for the elderly. This has opened up possibilities for what is termed Self-Help, whereby individuals in society have greater ability to monitor and control their health and life-styles. These possibilities extend to the concept of monitoring health throughout a whole life-long transition from infancy to old age, along with the identification of signposts that point to developments that may need medical attention in the future.
It was during discussions on these issues that the question arose as to how this monitoring could be carried out, and whether periodic blood tests were the appropriate method. It took only a brief thought to conclude that if this was a suitable method it might be a way of encouraging young people to join a PPG, which generally speaking they are uninterested in doing for obvious reasons.
We are entering a period of great change in health and social services in the UK and elsewhere as a result of which society attitudes will need to embrace its impact. General Practice will also change, perhaps dramatically, as the role of group networks is established together with associated specialist facilities.
Thanks for the information and for filling me in on the NHS. I heartily support the Self-Help approach in healthcare and I think that individuals do need to be actively engaged, as early as possible to make it work optimally.
Building networks is also a wonderful idea. I wonder about a waist circumference measurement, or some other fitness marker that would be less invasive but still universally relevant? Your team has clearly thought about this a lot, so I am just offering that off the top of my head! Applause for striving to engage and empower the patients in your care.
It will be interesting to see what unfolds. Several of the blood test markers are quite age dependent yet reports show ranges that are not age adjusted and cause the results for a 77 year old man to fall lower that the range for the entire population. My platelet count at age 77 is indeed lower than at age It was five years ago then went up for a few years and last week back at My GP has me at a specialist tomorrow.
Yet published research says for men over 75 the lower limit should be Hi Kevin and thanks for the question. It appears that platelet count generally does go down with age, and there may be a lower reference interval for those 75 and over as a lower range for older men, for older women.
It can take a while for reference intervals to change on a broader scale, so your MD is probably looking at a standard table, where a platelet range of is considered normal. Platelet count can go down related to a number of causes including medications, alcohol use, and some hematological issues. A specialist should be able to decide if you need more investigation or a longer period of observation and I hope you get good news! This would be most helpful. This is very frustrating. If not, might be good work for a grad student or intern.
I can understand your frustration in not being sure if the normal ranges for laboratory tests are normal for your particular age group. On reviewing my lab tests with a friend who uses a different health care provider we are both the same age, sex and ethnicity we discovered significant differences in ranges.
So my Doc says, tests all look good except glucose is a little high — compared to my friends normal ranges that would indicate I am already considered a diabetic and other things are out of range being either low or high. Biggest difference in our providers? My friend is with a premium provider and I am on a lower cost HMO in the US where healthcare is a profit motivated industry.
There should be standard lab values, but there can be variations depending on the type of test or the laboratory. Still, the information is pretty clear from national guidelines for things like glucose levels and diabetes. My patients do that all the time and it leads to a productive interaction in most cases. We have these kinds of issues in Canada too, even with a single-payer system — it can be provider-dependent or due to a range of other factors, but I take your point.
I am a relatively healthy year-old with no symptoms of anything. My doctor sent me for labs and they took 19 vials of blood one which required prior authorization in all they were 29 tests I have never gone through anything like this before.
Getting tested at routine intervals can allow you to see the way your body changes over time and empower you to make informed decisions about your health.
Your doctor will typically recommend that you get routine blood work at least once a year, around the same time as your yearly physical. But this is the bare minimum. There are several major reasons you may want to get blood tests more often than that:. Everything you eat and drink contains vitamins, proteins, and other nutrients that can cause the related levels in your blood to temporarily spike or drop.
Fasting for 8—12 hours helps ensure that blood test results are free from these variables, making your test results as accurate as possible.
Results may take anywhere from a few hours to a few days to become available. This can depend on the specific lab where you get tested or how many tests you get done at once. If you order multiple tests, you may not get the complete results until all of the tests are completed.
Sometimes a lab will only release results to your doctor, who reviews them and then releases them to you. Your doctor typically orders blood tests for you during a physical, checkup, or an appointment intended for a specific condition. Blood testing is usually partially or fully covered by insurance. Your doctor can also advise you on how to choose testing facilities that are reliable, well-managed, or convenient for you. You may end up paying the full cost by not going through an insurance plan, which can be expensive.
And some blood testing facilities may not give you accurate results. One infamous case of this is Theranos , a Palo Alto, California, biotechnology firm shut down in when an investigation uncovered lies and fraud around the accuracy of its private blood testing technology. A routine complete blood count CBC test checks for levels of 10 different components of every major cell in your blood: white blood cells, red blood cells, and platelets. Important components measured by this test include red blood cell count, hemoglobin, and hematocrit.
It also can be drawn using a finger prick. The person who draws your blood might tie a band around the upper part of your arm or ask you to make a fist. Doing this can make the veins in your arm stick out more, which makes it easier to insert the needle. The needle that goes into your vein is attached to a small test tube. The person who draws your blood removes the tube when it's full, and the tube seals on its own.
The needle is then removed from your vein. If you're getting a few blood tests, more than one test tube may be attached to the needle before it's withdrawn. Some people get nervous about blood tests because they're afraid of needles.
Others may not want to see blood leaving their bodies. If you're nervous or scared, it can help to look away or talk to someone to distract yourself. You might feel a slight sting when the needle goes in or comes out. Once the needle is withdrawn, you'll be asked to apply gentle pressure with a piece of gauze or bandage to the place where the needle was inserted.
This helps stop bleeding. It also helps prevent swelling and bruising. Most of the time, you can remove the pressure after a minute or two. You may want to keep a bandage on for a few hours. Usually, you don't need to do anything else after a blood test.
Results can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few weeks to come back. Your doctor should get the results. It's important that you follow up with your doctor to discuss your test results. The main risks of blood tests are discomfort and bruising at the site where the needle goes in. These complications usually are minor and go away shortly after the tests are done. Blood tests show whether the levels of different substances in your blood fall within a normal range.
For many blood substances, the normal range is the range of levels seen in 95 percent of healthy people in a certain group. For many tests, normal ranges vary depending on your age, gender, race, and other factors. Your blood test results may fall outside the normal range for many reasons.
Abnormal results might be a sign of a disorder or disease. Other factors—such as diet, menstrual cycle, physical activity level, alcohol intake, and medicines both prescription and over the counter —also can cause abnormal results. Your doctor should discuss any unusual or abnormal blood test results with you. These results may or may not suggest a health problem. Many diseases and medical problems can't be diagnosed with blood tests alone.
However, blood tests can help you and your doctor learn more about your health. Blood tests also can help find potential problems early, when treatments or lifestyle changes may work best. NOTE: All values in this section are for adults only.
They don't apply to children. Talk to your child's doctor about values on blood tests for children. The table below shows some normal ranges for different parts of the complete blood count CBC test.
Some of the normal ranges differ between men and women. Other factors, such as age and race, also may affect normal ranges. Your doctor should discuss your results with you.
He or she will advise you further if your results are outside the normal range for your group. You don't need any special preparations for most blood tests. For some tests, you may need to fast not eat or drink for several hours before your test. Your health care provider will let you know if there are any special instructions to follow.
There is very little risk to having a finger prick test or venipuncture. During venipuncture, you may have slight pain or bruising at the spot where the needle was put in, but most symptoms go away quickly. There is very little risk to your baby with a heel stick test. Your baby may feel a little pinch when the heel is poked, and a small bruise may form at the site.
Collecting blood from an artery is more painful than collecting from a vein, but complications are rare. You may have some bleeding, bruising, or soreness at the spot where the needle was put in. Also, you should avoid lifting heavy objects for 24 hours after the test. Blood testing can provide important information about your health. But it doesn't always give enough information about your condition. If you've had blood work, you may need other types of tests before your provider can make a diagnosis.
The information on this site should not be used as a substitute for professional medical care or advice. Contact a health care provider if you have questions about your health.
What are blood tests? Blood tests are also used to: Help diagnose certain diseases and conditions Monitor a chronic disease or condition, such as diabetes or high cholesterol Find out if treatment for a disease is working Check how well your organs are working.
Your organs include your liver, kidneys, heart, and thyroid.
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