January 15, 2018 – Fasting and LDL

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Anchor lead: You may not need to fast before having your blood tested for cholesterol, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Fasting may be thing of the past when it comes to testing for cholesterol in the blood. That’s according to research by Seth Martin, a cardiologist at Johns Hopkins, and colleagues, comparing the older method for calculating the various components of cholesterol with the new one. Martin says the new one is more accurate, and patients are the winners.

Martin: They struggle to get to the lab before eating, they’re missing work, they’re seeing us in the clinic, we’re saying you probably need to come back another day to get your labs drawn, and that still might be important in some patients, but for most patients we believe that they can do the lipid profile in the nonfasting state and still get as good a result, the caveat being that labs need to update to our modern method of LDL estimation.  :27

Martin says the new method is already widely employed.

Martin: I’ve been really glad to see that its happened throughout the US by Quest diagnostics, and many other labs are adopting this.  :07

At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.