While it seems mundane, routine lab work is essential to good health. You might not feel ill when your provider recommends a blood screening, but there can be underlying changes occurring.
Think of routine lab work as eavesdropping on your body’s internal conversations. While you feel perfectly normal, your blood is carrying countless messages about how your organs are functioning, how your metabolism is running, and whether any problems are creeping up.
It’s like having a security system for your house. Your lab work is that early warning system for your health.
By the time many health conditions start to make you feel sick, they’ve already been setting up shop in your body for months or even years.
Routine lab work allows us to identify health issues before they become illnesses. This allows us to make recommendations on lifestyle changes to improve your health and reduce your risk of chronic illness.
The most common labs ordered during annual visits include screening for diabetes with a glucose check, cholesterol with a lipid panel, and thyroid disease with a TSH. Sometimes a complete blood cell count will be done to check for anemia and infection.
If you manage a condition like high blood pressure or diabetes, tests are even more important. They help your care team see how well your treatment is working and make adjustments if needed before small problems become big ones.
You might be amazed by how much a small vial of blood can reveal about your health.
Routine labs can detect conditions such as prediabetes or mildly elevated cholesterol as well as other conditions. These conditions can turn into diseases with lasting and lifelong health conditions.
Here’s what some of the most common tests are checking for:
Getting your results back can feel overwhelming. All those numbers and medical terms can look like a foreign language. But here’s the good news: you don’t have to decode them alone.
Your provider’s job is to translate those numbers into plain English and help you understand what they mean for your health. If something needs attention, they’ll walk you through your options.
We’ll discuss what an expected normal result would be, if yours is abnormal, and how we can move forward to identify the cause of the abnormal lab and most importantly, work on improving it.
Getting routine lab work done is one of the simplest, most cost-effective investments you can make in your long-term health. It takes just a few minutes of your time, but the insights it provides can guide important decisions about your care for years to come.
Call your primary care provider to learn what blood work you should have done to get the most information for your unique situation.
Zachary Mattka, DO, is a primary care physician with Intermountain Health Wheat Ridge Clinic and a Colorado native. His clinical interests include lifestyle medicine, chronic disease management, and women’s health.
