Cholesterol Tests : “The Good”, “The Bad”, and “The Ugly”
Warrick Bishop
Preventative Cardiologist | CEO Healthy Heart Network | #1 Best Selling Author | Educator | Changemaker | Tedx Speaker
In this article I’m going to cover a little bit of information about cholesterol tests. Many of us have gone to our local doctor and had a regular cholesterol blood test or what we doctors tend to call a “lipid profile” (lipid pertaining to fat and profile meaning description). Generally fasting, we'd make an effort not to eat from the night before, and we go along and duly expose our vein to the person who is going to take the blood, a phlebotomist, and then send it off to the lab for analysis....Ouch.
So what do we test when we're looking at a lipid profile or a “cholesterol test”? There's generally a panel of things we look at, a number of different components to the test. I'm going to walk through those just very simply, so you have some idea of what we're looking to assess and why. Generally the test is done after you've been fasting and it is generally considered over eight hours is the appropriate time; more than about 12 or 14 hours is too long as sometimes the body can change the way it is metabolizing and this will make changes to the profile so it can start to become less representative.
The first thing that we evaluate is the total cholesterol, which measures all the cholesterol within the blood. There is a range as you might imagine for total cholesterol, but the average is somewhere around 5 or 5.5 mmols per liter...
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