This is the best blood test for
riboflavin status.
Hi. I'm Dr. Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com. And this is
Chris Masterjohn Lite, where the name of the game is
"Details? Shmeetails. Just tell me what works!"
And today we're going to talk about
blood testing for riboflavin status. You
may be following the suggestions for
getting enough riboflavin in the diet.
But you may have factors that are
increasing your needs, or you may have
poor absorption. For some reason, you may
have signs or symptoms of riboflavin
deficiency, or you may just want to be on
the safe side, and you may want to be
very proactive about monitoring your
nutritional status. Either of these would
be good reasons to test your riboflavin
status. The best test for riboflavin
status, the gold standard, is not
available in any test. So the best choice
out of what is available is LabCorp's
whole blood total riboflavin. In this
test you want to make sure that your
results are in their range, and I would
like to collect data if you're willing.
I would like to collect data on whether we
can improve this to make it an
approximation of the gold standard
that's used in the literature, which is
the erythrocyte glutathione reductase
activity coefficient, or EGRAC. This
test is not available, but I believe that
if we take the LabCorp total whole
blood total riboflavin test, and you get
a complete blood count in the same
measurement, we may be able to estimate
what the gold standard would be. And
I have designed a calculator to do that at
chrismasterjohnphd.com/riboflavincalculator.
If you go there, you can plug in your data
for your hemoglobin level and for your whole
blood total riboflavin, and I would like
to see if the ranges that I recommend
for the output of that
calculator, how well they line up with
the range that LabCorp is using. And I'd
love to hear your comments on the post
that has that calculator about whether the
LabCorp range or the range of my
calculator was more useful
to you in determining your riboflavin
status based on your signs and symptoms
and your experience of whether you seem
to actually need more riboflavin in
terms of whether including more
riboflavin-rich foods or riboflavin
supplements helps you out. I'd like to
know which is a better predictor of that
because that may help improve the
guidelines in the future beyond what my
guidelines are now, which is just use the
range that LabCorp has for whole blood
total riboflavin.
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Signing off, this is Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com.
This has been Chris Masterjohn Lite.
And I will see you in the next episode.