10 posts
One fasting glucose of 100 sits at the edge of a threshold that was drawn by committee, and a single draw carries more measurement noise than most people expect. Here is how to read the number, what to measure next, and how to analyze the data yourself.
A fasting glucose of 86 mg/dL sits in the middle of the normal range and is not low. The more useful question is how much your fasting glucose moves from day to day, which one draw cannot answer.
Fasting glucose above post-meal glucose is a common and mostly explainable pattern: overnight hepatic glucose output, dawn hormones, sensor and meter measurement error, and meal composition. Here is how to tell them apart with CGM data and lab numbers.
How to choose a blood test cadence from analyte kinetics and biological variation, how to tell a real change from assay noise using reference change values, and how to structure the data so you can analyze it yourself.
What CGM error looks like in the data: interstitial lag, compression artifacts, sensor-to-sensor bias, and a protocol for measuring your own sensor's accuracy against fingersticks using the raw exports.
What a blood biomarker test measures, what it costs and how to get the numbers out. Covers the math that shows whether a change between draws is real.
A direct look at what a maximal blood panel contains and which assays add real information. Covers marketing claims and getting the raw data.
An essay prompted by Carolyn Bertozzi's lecture on bioorthogonal chemistry: what the reactions are, the second-order rate constants that decide what can be imaged in a living animal, and why the glycome is still a missing data layer in most molecular profiles.
What quantum mechanics says about measurement, where observer and observed are genuinely coupled in biology, and why a longitudinal personal dataset has to account for the effect of measuring on the person measured.
The Sinclair-associated biological age test is a buccal DNA methylation clock. Here is what methylation clocks measure, how noisy they are, and how to get data you can analyze yourself.