Common Problems With Cholesterol Testing Kits

The most important aspects of cholesterol testing kits are, like all medical checks, accuracy and consistency. Even a simple thermometer is actually worse than useless unless it can gauge your temperature to a fairly high degree of accuracy and reproduce the same readings time and again.

Fortunately most medical testing kits available these days are manufactured to repeatedly perform to a very high standard. Problems are certainly sometimes encountered but all too often these are the result of “user error”. You would think it might be difficult to get an erroneous reading from a modern thermometer for example, but the difference between an ear that has been lying against a pillow and one that has been exposed can be quite significant

The root cause of most problems encountered with cholesterol testing kits is simple failure to read and/or follow the instructions. You are not for example going to obtain especially reliable results if you eat or drink anything within 12 hours before taking the blood sample since blood cholesterol is manufactured by your liver when digesting food.

Another main source of problems is failing to produce enough clean blood for the sample. Sometimes people don’t observe basic hygiene procedures and so whatever was on their hands gets into the sample which of course can skew the results one way or the other. Or they may experience difficulty in drawing blood and either not collect sufficient for a viable test sample or take so long extracting enough that it no longer qualifies as a fresh sample.

Even if the blood sample is good, things can go wrong during the analysis. Some test kits use reflective photometry so they can be affected by sudden exposure to a strong light or heat source – yet it is amazing how many people will take one of these kits over to a reading light so they can examine the result more easily!

Yet it may surprise some people that even if everything is done properly it is still possible to get an errant result. This can happen even with professional tests – some days your cholesterol levels are for some reason actually higher or lower than the average. Which is the reason you should monitor the average and not take too much notice of individual readings.

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