Lab Testing

Total cholesterol: The total amount of cholesterol contained in your transport particles.

  • What we commonly call “cholesterol” is actually a very complex transport system of lipids (fats), throughout the bloodstream. Your body has a system of transport particles that take cholesterol from liver into areas of damage (bad), and ones that take cholesterol away from areas of damage (good)
  • HDL-C: The amount of cholesterol in HDL particles that take cholesterol OUT of your vessels and to your liver. 
  • LDL-C: The amount of cholesterol in LDL particles that put cholesterol INTO your vessels.
  • Triglycerides: the amount of fat in the blood. You have different levels of fat deposition in different organs, including your blood.
  • Apolipoprotein-B: There are more transport particles than just LDL that are “bad”. Apo-B helps quantify how many bad particles you have floating in your blood and is a better* predictor than LDL for cardiovascular disease risk. 
  • Lp(a): This is another transport particle like LDL, except it seems to be mostly genetically controlled, and may explain part of the familial risk of CV disease. So far lowering this with medications doesn’t seem to help reduce risk, HOWEVER, this is important to check because it can help guide how aggressive we need to be in addressing other risk factors, and may serve as a treatment target for future medications.
  • A1c: Standard test for diabetes looks at how much blood sugar is attached to your red blood cells. A very helpful test in diagnosing diabetes, changes to insulin resistance begin to happen years to decades before a change in A1c is seen.
  • 2 hour Glucose Tolerance Test: The earliest stage of diabetes that contributes to damaged blood vessels is called insulin resistance. This happens when your body is becoming more inefficient at processing sugar. We test for this checking your blood sugar at timed intervals after we give you a certain amount of sugar. The results of this are very important because at this stage, identifying this resistance IS reversible with changes to lifestyle