Awareness and right knowledge would be the first step towards good health. Routine blood tests once a year should be a practice that we should adopt after we cross the age of 35. Having seen patients regularly, I have come across many cases, when people suddenly get to know about high diabetes or high creatinine or fatty liver issues. One of the reasons why they come to know about these issues much later is because they had not got routine blood tests done earlier. Regular blood testing is usually, if not always, very helpful when it comes to evaluating many common complaints that affect aging adults.
With lifestyle diseases on the rise, we see many patients who start developing high cholesterol or prediabetes or high BP around mid-30s. Hence, it will be prudent to get regularly checked once we cross the age of 35. Mentioning below most basic and important parameters that we want everyone to know about which can be done with simple blood tests.
Diabetes: India is a home to over 74 million diabetics and another 72 million pre-diabetics. India is referred to as the diabetic capital of the world. Four important blood tests to check your diabetes or prediabetes levels are:
Fasting sugar – This is very commonly known to all of us.
Fasting insulin – Not so commonly known, fasting insulin tells us whether we are prediabetic or not.
HbA1C – A very important test for diabetes which gives a 3 months avg of blood sugar levels.
C-Peptide – This test is specially used for type 1 diabetes. C-Peptide is a test that tells us how much Insulin our body is making.
Liver: LFT or Liver Function Test is a very common test to understand the health of our liver. Liver enzymes like SGOT, SGPT and many others if elevated then we know we have signs of fatty liver. In fact, non-alcoholic fatty liver (NAFL) is rising extremely rapidly because of unhealthy lifestyle and wrong diets.
Kidney: Chronic kidney disease is on the rise and the main two contributors are rising high BP and diabetes. We are all aware about creatinine as a common test to check kidney health. Another important parameter that we want people to check is eGFR. GFR stands for glomerular filtration rate, the rate at which our kidney is filtering blood.
Heart health: Coronary artery disease is the number one cause of death in both, men and women in India. We all are aware about the importance of Lipid profile and we all check that regularly, however there are few important biomarkers for heart health that are not commonly known. First is Lipoprotein(a). It is a small particle of LDL which creates more damage to our arteries and increases blockages. Second is homocysteine. High homocysteine is related to sudden heartattacks.
Thyroid: We all are aware about T3, T4, TSH, FT3 and FT4 which are the common test for thyroid. However, we would also want to emphasise on anti-TPO test. A growing number of people are being diagnosed with autoimmune thyroid also known as Hashimoto’s disease and the way to get it diagnosed is a simple blood test known as anti-TPO.
Essential vitamins & minerals: Four essentials which we want everyone to check once a year are Vitamin B12, Vitamin D3, Calcium and Magnesium. Each of these have numerous roles to play for the healthy running of our body.
Blood pressure: A normal blood pressure is 120/80 however there have been many cases when patients tell us that we came to know all of a sudden that our BP was 170/110 or something as high as that. Hence regularly monitoring is always a better idea.
Uric Acid: High uric acid levels can be damaging to healthy kidneys and proper blood circulation. Hence, uric acid should be in your annual routine check-up list.
(Karan Kakkad is a Disease Reversal expert based in India. He is the Founder & CEO of Reverse Factor. To know more call 8100550660 or visit www.reversefactor.in)
