The Ultimate Guide to Decoding Your Blood Test Results

By Eric Wechter

Even if you’re a CrossFit champ or a marathon maven, getting a regular check-up just makes sense. What doesn’t always make sense is the baffling list of medical terms on the blood test results that are part of nearly all routine exams. Navigating through these terms can lead you down a Google rabbit hole. What the heck is bilirubin? And if you’re all about that bass, could your heart be pumping too many basophils?

Apart from the puzzling jargon, the design of bloodwork lab reports is dismal. Wonderful makeovers have been envisioned, but until they’re in use, we’re stuck deciphering highly technical and administrative-looking documents that make tax forms look like an ecard from mom.

But have no fear. You can become literate in your blood test results. Our guide isn’t a comprehensive glossary of technical terms, but it provides basic definitions and a better overall visual sense of how the information on a typical blood test report is presented and organized so you can interpret your blood work with confidence.

It’s in the Blood

First, let’s back up a bit and explain why blood work is so important. In a healthy body, blood is takin’ care of business (every day). It’s helpful to think of your blood as both an oxygen delivery system The dual roles of red blood cells in tissue oxygen delivery: oxygen carriers and regulators of local blood flow. Jensen FB. The Journal of Experimental Biology. 2009 Nov.; 212 (Pt 21): 3387-93. doi: 10.1242. and a waste removal mechanism. Certain organs in the body, such as the liver, kidney, spleen, and lungs, act as processing stations. Normal values on a lab report basically indicate healthy organ function and that these systems are fully operational. It’s important to note that values for a test that are out of range don’t necessarily indicate imminent disease. Normal ranges for each test are established by testing a large population of healthy individuals. However, those ranges can be influenced by a host of factors for each individual, including age, sex, weight, medical history, medicines, and lifestyle. So what’s “normal” for you is best determined by your doctor.

Lab Result Organization, or Lack Thereof

For a routine check-up, a blood sample is usually examined with three main tests: a complete blood count, a comprehensive metabolic panel, and a lipid panel (or profile). These tests return a number of specific results. However, instead of grouping the specific results under the three main tests, many reports simply present a single column of test results under “Test Name.” To better understand your lab report, it’s helpful to recognize the inter-relationship of the test results. Here are basic descriptions of the three major tests and results that …read more

Source:: Greatist