You may feel perfectly fine at your annual checkup, but your doctor still orders lab tests. According to Dr. Sydney Le Guyader, an internal medicine physician at Intermountain Health, that is exactly the point.
If your doctor were to ask, “How’s your liver?” most people would not know how to answer. Lab testing helps provide that answer.
“Labs really, I find that there’s two main roles,” Dr. Le Guyader said. “One is to screen, screen you for conditions that might pop up down the road or inform us about your risk for conditions that might pop up down the road.”
Cholesterol screening is one example. Doctors begin checking levels in early adulthood and continue throughout life to assess long-term risk for heart attack or stroke.
Lab results can also help detect conditions such as kidney disease, liver disease, diabetes, prediabetes and high cholesterol before symptoms appear.
“Lab tests provide a snapshot of what’s going on in your body, like checking your kidney function, cholesterol levels, or blood sugar levels. There are lots of conditions where the diagnosis is primarily made based on lab test results. For some conditions, you may or may not have symptoms,” she said.
It can be tempting to review results online and try to interpret the numbers yourself. Dr. Le Guyader says context matters.
“That relationship that patients have with their primary care provider is so valuable,” she said. “We get to know you well. We get to know you over 5, 10, hopefully as long as you’ll have us and help you pick the right labs that will inform your health and then interpret them and then use that information.”
Over time, those results become even more meaningful.
“It’s important to have a long-term relationship with your primary care provider. That’s when lab tests are most meaningful, when we can monitor your health and look at the results over a course of years,” she said.
Even when you feel healthy, lab tests can act as an early warning system. The power of early detection, Dr. Le Guyader says, can help prevent bigger health problems down the road.
To find a primary care or internal medicine provider or to make an appointment for a yearly checkup visit intermountainhealth.org
