How up-to-date are you with your annual checkups? Does your car get better routine maintenance than you these days? In today’s climate is easy to forget to put on your oxygen mask first. Yet, there’s a reason for this saying.

Preventive bloodwork is essential to catch early warning signs of disease before symptoms arise or to halt disease progression. What you’ll need to have tested will depend upon your age, biological sex, risk factors, past medical history, and family history. Too often clients come to me saying their provider was ‘watching’ their labs. ‘For what?’, I’d say. Most of the time they acknowledged had no answer except the provider was in effect waiting for the lab to worsen and they’d be given a diagnosis, medication, or both.

Here are some of the most common blood tests:

A Complete Blood Count (CBC) checks red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets. A CBC can identify conditions including anemia, heart disease, autoimmune disease, leukemia, and other cancers.

A Complete Metabolic Panel (CMP) checks kidney function, lung function, liver function, and basic blood sugar levels. This test can identify common kidney problems, lung problems, and diabetes or pre-diabetes.

Hemoglobin A1C – This is a 2 to 3-month look back at how high blood sugar has lingered in your bloodstream.

A Lipid Panel checks for cholesterol, triglycerides, and other blood fat levels. This test is an early screening for coronary artery disease.

Other considerations include Iron, Vitamin D, Thyroid, and Homocysteine levels.

Annual tests for these are a minimum. More frequent testing will depend upon your results and follow-up.

Does your provider run these tests? You are your best advocate to speak up and get the most knowledge from your annual checkups.

I can help increase your confidence in achieving your health goals by getting to the root cause of your symptoms. I am accepting clients to my new program, Hangry to Happy! Click here to watch my program video!