DrKrupka.com

All right, let's discuss homocysteine. It's a test we do on all of our annual physical panels. I think it's a pretty important test. Everybody ought to have it done at least once a year. If you've got issues with it more often than that. To keep an eye on it, I'm going to go through and explain why we test it, what it is, why it matters, what the normal range is, and what we do about it when it's out of range. So you're going to kind of get an all encompassing little primer on homocysteine right here. Whether you've gotten it from one of your other doctors or whether you have a test from me and you don't remember our discussion about it when we went over it, this will be a good way for you to either revisit that or look at what you've gotten from your other doctor and interpret it on your own.

(00:45)
Alright, so what is homocysteine? First of all, H-O-M-O-C-Y-S-T-E-I-N-E homocysteine. It is what we call an intermediate product in a pathway that pro...

So I was listening to another clinician talk recently about getting lab work done in a non-fasted state. And you guys know, things like cholesterol and blood sugar and things like that, when we send you to the lab for those, we generally want you to be fasting when you go into the lab. 6, 8, 10 hours without eating, you can certainly have water, but we want a decent amount of time without food consumption before you go into the lab and have those drawn. So there's a little bit of a push now to say, look, why don't we just do labs in the condition in which people live? Most people don't spend most of their time in the fasted state. Yes, you wake up that way, but then you eat, and then later you eat, and then later you eat again, and you snack a little bit, and then you exercise, and then you eat again, and then you go back to bed.

So most of your time is not spent in the fasting state, most of your time is spent in some version of what we loosely call the f...