Accepted answer
The relevant statistical point is that a ninety-five per cent reference interval means one analyte in twenty will read out of range in a healthy person by construction.
A twenty-analyte panel run on a healthy person will produce, on average, one out-of-range result purely from how reference intervals are constructed. That is arithmetic rather than pathology.
Stated carefully, delta checks — comparing against your own previous value — are far more sensitive than comparing against a population interval, which is the argument for keeping a series rather than a snapshot.
External quality assurance schemes document between-laboratory differences on common analytes that routinely exceed the size of clinically interesting changes.
Keep the full report, not the number. You will need the units and the interval later.
edited 26 Sept 2025 by fiadh_cronin — removed a claim I could not source
2Is the assay method stated on your report? Two immunoassays for the same analyte do not agree with each other. – nominal_ten 3 months ago add a comment