**Episode Title: Day 11: Advanced Lipid Testing - Beyond the Basics** **Host:** Welcome to day 11. Well, we've talked about cholesterol panels where we look at total cholesterol, good cholesterol, HDL, bad cholesterol, LDL. We can talk about ratios. We can look at triglycerides as well. But what is there beyond that? Well, there's a number of things that you might do or that you might discuss with your doctor, or your doctor may even suggest. We've touched on lipoprotein little a, or LP. That might be something that's really important, and the recommendation is that everyone should have at least one LPA test in their lifetime. You might be interested in talking to your doctor about ApoB. ApoB gives us an idea of how many LDL particles there are, how many bad LDL particles there are. And why is ApoB helpful? I touched on during the triglyceride and insulin resistance day that the LDL particle size can change. It can be large and fluffy or small and dense. You don't know the difference if you're just measuring LDL cholesterol because they get combined. But if you measure ApoB simultaneously, then if you've got small dense cholesterol, you'll have many more particles for the same amount of cholesterol compared to someone who's got large fluffy particles. I hope that makes sense. So, ApoB can be one of the markers that we can look at. It helps us with particle size and ties into particle size. The particle size story is interesting with the understanding that small particle size is probably associated with the metabolic processes that include insulin resistance and therefore hyperinsulinemia, probably elevated sugar levels, greater inflammation, and greater risk of event. Lots going on there. When it comes to particle size, though, if you look at total triglyceride levels or triglyceride levels to HDL ratios, if that ratio is less than 1.3, you probably have lots of large fluffy particles anyway, so there's no need to get a panel. There are other tests as well. Things like polygenic risk scores are going to become more and more prevalent, and they're going to look at a whole range of genes that you've got and try and figure out if those genes are a marker for event. Watch this space. We're also starting to see people measure inflammatory sort of markers, things like C-reactive protein, to try and understand if you have inflammation in your body. It's a really interesting space. For now, I'm going to wrap it up. I do hope you live as well as possible for as long as possible. Take care and bye for now, and stay tuned. We're on our last couple of days. Goodbye.