DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH?
- Concise Curated Counselling
- 5 days ago
- 2 min read
With the pharmacists' expanding scope, be ready to answer these questions as best you can.
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1. Counselling Conundrum: a real question from a patient
2. Concise Conclusion: a straight-forward patient-friendly answer
3. Quick Wrap-up
Clearly, there are nuances that may not be captured in this format. The goal here is to provide you with helpful counselling tips which often draw from multiple sources or those which are not commonly accessed by busy healthcare providers serving the community.
Counselling Conundrum: "I hear doctors often don't routinely check things that may be best practice to include in bloodwork or may miss things because they are so busy. Is there anything you recommend that I ask them to check?"
Concise Conclusion: This is a tough questions because it depends on the individual. However, some important ones include APOE genotype for Alzheimer's and heart/cholesterol tests like ApoB and Lp(a). These are not part of many guidelines, but can give you significant insight into your own health.
Quick Wrap-up: Guidelines are catching up to using ApoB rather than LDL-C (although it was not covered by OHIP a few years ago, it is now), because it measures more closely the number of atherogenic particles, rather than merely the cholesterol in blood (the former being more closely tied to CV events). Lp(a) (i.e. lipoprotein a) can tell you about your risk of aortic stenosis, and overall CV risk, and it need only be tested once in a lifetime given it's genetically determined nature. APOE genotype can be obtained from genetic tests (i.e. 23&me) which can inform you of a possible increased risk of Alzheimer's disease and it need only be checked once in a lifetime.
Dive Deeper
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