Hemassist said:
Good analysis. The high triglycerides/cholesterol might also tie in the with the higher HCT.
Why? Do you have a link showing a connection between the two? Or are you just suggesting that both might result from steroid use? But as RR notes, steroids alone would be unlikely to increase HT that much.
And btw, his cholesterol was not high (for a normal person, perhaps for an athlete, I don't know), nor was his iron, for that matter. To be fair, his cholesterol level on one test would be considered high today, but not at that time.
python said:
it turns out that the supposedly brimming with health, this not even 20 youngster, in addition to the old man like lipids loaded blood, had a border line impaired immune system....
specifically, the package contains the records of armstrong's two 1991 WBC counts and the differential. they are separated by 6 months but show a remarkably consistent picture of the border-line/abnormal immune system (abnormally low neutrophils and abnormally high lymphocytes).
This is an interesting idea, but there are some problems. First, I don’t think a few borderline immune parameters, by themselves, are very significant. I myself have had a few immune parameters out of the range, and it didn’t mean anything.
The ranges they provide are meant to include perhaps 95% of the population. This means that when you are measuring a lot of different parameters, the odds are quite good that any particular individual will have one or more outside the range, just by chance (e.g., his globulins in Dec. but not June). As you noted, his neutrophil/lymphocyte values are barely out of the range in the first test, and are within the range in the second test. In fact, there is not a single parameter measured that was out of the common range in both tests. His triglycerides, e.g., were normal in the June test. This suggests to me that the high level in December, while it might have resulted from steroid use, also could have been caused by binge drinking at the time.
A second difficulty in interpreting these data is that the levels are given in relative terms, i.e., % of total cells of that class, rather than absolute terms. Most white blood cells are either neutrophils or lymphocytes, so a greater than average % of one will usually be associated with a lesser than average % of the other. But without knowing the absolute numbers of each, one can’t say whether either level is actually significantly abnormal. E.g., LA might happen to have a naturally, unusually high level of lymphocytes, which could result in normal levels of neutrophils being measured as low in terms of %.
Finally, and most important, steroid use is usually associated with high, not low, neutrophils, and with low or normal, not high, banded (immature) neutrophils, and conversely, with low, not high, lymphocytes. This is just the opposite of what we see with LA. Also, as I noted earlier, his globulin levels were actually high on one test, another observation not consistent with steroid use.
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