With the improvement of public health awareness, many people know that they need to have an empty stomach before going to the hospital for examination, so now many people will pay attention to fasting and not eating before going to the hospital for examination. This is indeed the progress of the people's health awareness, which is a commendable thing. But do you have to skip food on an empty stomach before you draw your blood? Is this really the best? Today Dr. Zhang will come to tell you about this problem.
In fact, strictly speaking, there are several reasons why everyone is on an empty stomach before blood testing, the most important of which is that when the blood is drawn, the blood lipids found need to be examined on an empty stomach, so the convention is that almost all patients must be fasting before drawing blood. In fact, to be honest, some laboratory tests do not require an empty stomach. If you just check something that doesn't require an fasting blood test, it's totally okay to eat. So, why should blood lipids be drawn and tested to pay special attention to not eating on an empty stomach?
There are two main reasons: the first point is that the triglycerides in blood lipids are particularly susceptible to the influence of diet, if the person who does the examination eats some high-fat foods in the morning, the triglycerides are likely to be elevated when the test is done in the morning, which is brought about by diet. The second point is that LDL may also be affected by diet, as the detection of LDL depends on the detection of fasting lipoprotein, which is then calculated using friedwald's formula. Therefore, LDL is also best checked on an empty stomach. For these two reasons, blood lipid tests are usually performed on an empty stomach.
Since the vast majority of people now draw blood on an empty stomach, does non-fasting lipid testing still make sense? In fact, the detection of non-fasting conditions still has some significance. Why?
Because fasting is defined as an 8-hour state of not eating. The human body spends most of the day in a non-fasting state, and only at one o'clock in the morning is an empty stomach. Blood lipids in the fasting state do not reflect the real situation of the human body, because the human body is more often in a non-fasting state, so the blood lipids monitored in the non-fasting state may be more real and more reflect the real blood lipid situation of the human body. Therefore, in view of this, the European medical community issued the European version of the non-fasting lipid guidelines in 2016, and the Chinese medical community followed suit, and after many rounds of discussion, finally released China's "Non-fasting Lipid Detection and Clinical Application Recommendations". These reflect the importance we should pay attention to the blood lipid examination in the non-fasting state, because it is possible that this is the most real blood lipid state of the human body.
In addition to the above mentioned point of view, in fact, there are some practical problems, that is, many patients themselves have chronic diseases such as diabetes, and every time they test blood, they have to come to the hospital in the morning without eating, a toss is a morning, and many people have serious complications such as hypoglycemia for this reason. At the same time, there are some people who come down to check the body on an empty stomach and tell him to do a test, but if he needs to change his abdomen, he may not come because he is afraid of trouble, which is easy to form a missed diagnosis. Therefore, for these people, it is more appropriate to detect blood lipids in a non-fasting state.
Of course, to mention to you that this non-fasting state test cannot be changed overnight, because it involves more problems, which are both professional and real management. However, it should be said that we should strive to give these people with special circumstances more opportunities to do tests on a "non-fasting stomach" and develop a series of reference values. This could benefit more people. It is hoped that in the near future, there will be a set of reference ranges for test indicators in non-fasting states, which will be convenient for those who do tests in non-fasting states.