Male, late 50s. No cardiac symptoms. EKG in 2018 was fine. No recent illness nor injury; no known cause for inflammation.
I am a long-term 3x/week lifter (currently on Hypertrophy I) and long-term consumer of Peri-Rx and heavy animal protein (200g/day, a lot of it low-fat dairy, various meats & salmon; not enough veg/greens).
I recently did the wrong thing (perhaps) in ordering some tests online from pure curiosity. Some results were out of range.
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C-Reactive Protein, Cardiac: 15-ish (while reference range is given variously as 0-3 or 0-10)
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Cholesterol: Total/HDL ratio is a little high, at 5.2 (HDL 31, LDL 115). Apo B/A ratio seems high: 1.2 (“3x avg. risk” with ApoA 88, ApoB 109)
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Cortisol AM of 20, a bit high
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Creatinine 1.38, GFR 57, both slightly out of reference
Obviously, I will go to my usual doctor for any follow-up. The question here is: Could any of these results have been distorted (or other future tests be distorted) by me being a “long-term 3x/week lifter & consumer of Peri-Rx and heavy animal protein”?
If yes: should I then cut my intake for a few weeks perhaps, before pursuing with my usual doctor?
I dread being put a statin drug, just because those are classic “lifetime subscription” drugs.
I don’t think it would be appropriate to weigh-in on your specific test results without more info, follow-up, etc. (e.g. a consultation). A few thoughts for education purposes:
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CRP is an inflammatory marker that can go up in response to acute exercise in the last few days. If taken a few days after exercise, long-term changes in this marker tend to go down as a response to increased fitness and/or decreased body fat.
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Chronic exercise tends to reduce atherogenic lipoprotein levels, not increase them. A quick word on statins, they tend to work much better than exercise and/or diet at reducing risk of ASCVD, though we would obviously recommend both. They are also very inexpensive and relatively low risk. Withholding or avoiding a medication that would benefit their risk of disease and premature mortality just because they might not be able to come off of it in the future seems like an inappropriate decision.
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Not only an irrelevant test outside of very specific signs and symptoms of disease, but the effect of exercise on cortisol depends entirely on the proximity to the exercise bout. If the previous exercise bout was a few hours before the test, then there could be a marked effect. If not, meh.
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Exercise doesn’t really alter creatinine (and thus estimated GFR), but short-term creatine supplementation can.
As far as what you should do for general health promotion, these would be our recommendations in addition to following up with your physician.
Thanks.
“I don’t think it would be appropriate to weigh-in…without more info” - Of course - thus, I focused on whether these tests in general could get distorted by bodybuilding.
“CRP is an inflammatory marker that can go up in response to acute exercise in the last few days” - this sounds like a possible Yes - like chronic exercise could make it normal for one to have a certain background inflammation and CRP? Please correct me if that’s wrong.
The links - read a couple before, will be sure to hit all the remainder. Thanks again.
Usually chronic exercise lowers CRP, though if a training bout was completed in close succession to the blood draw, this could distort things due to the proximity, yes.