1st big round of blood test results

I had the privilege of driving in Dallas traffic by myself tonight; which isn't nearly as bad as doing it with an unhappy little miss in the car with me.  I had an appointment with Dr. B. to go over Megan's blood work results.  These are the results from the three different blood draws she had a few weeks ago.  I was expecting the results to be "bad", meaning for there to be several things that are outside of the normal range; obviously her body is not processing things well or we wouldn't be where we are today.

Dr. B. was so kind as to start the appointment off by saying "these are bad.  I mean I was expecting bad, I shouldn't be surprised based on what you tell me about her...but these are BAD!".  Thanks a whole heap lady.  :-)

Basically there are several items (alanine, glycine, iron, seratonin, etc) where Megan is way off the chart either high or low.  A lot of the items are related to the methylation cycle which was expected based on her other test results.  She does have the MTHFR gene mutation (this test showed that) and so the items relating to the methylation cycle relate to that.  There are 4 different areas that the cycle involves and she has something askew in every area.  In order to determine what is causing each item to be off we have to do more testing.  We can't just treat the area that is high or low because without further testing we can't be sure what is causing the issue.  For example, her serotonin is crazy high but that number could be high for various reasons: either she isn't processing what she is making and thereby storing the excess, or she is making too much and is using what she can and can't get rid of the excess, or the next step in the cycle (melatonin) isn't pulling what it needs and there is excess, etc.  You can see why we need to know why she has so much before treating to know exactly where the breakdown is in the process.  This is the case for every "off" item in the methylation cycle.  The testing for the methylation cycle takes about 6 weeks to get back once we complete it.  In the mean time we will continue to work on getting everything in her current treatment plan going.  There are supplements that might help her with some of these issues once we get them on board.

There are a few other items that are askew that don't have anything to do with the methylation cycle.  We will be addressing these items with her pediatrician tomorrow and will take it from there.  Some of them have shown up on previous tests and when we asked about them we were told it wasn't a big deal, etc that some people just make more or less of those items.

We still need to figure out a way to get some DNA results back for Megan so I will be speaking to her geneticist office again tomorrow.