Best Practices for Differential Diagnosis

While discussing differential diagnoses, Elaine Cochran, MD, sayswhen she has a patient who could need the assistance of the National Institutes of Health she works with their primary care physician to prepare them for the next steps as best she can.

She says that can include tests like a fasting lipid panel, a fasting insulin level, and a fasting c-Peptide level as well as a hemoglobin A1c test.

“Another very important feature about these patients as opposed to other metabolic syndrome patients, they’re not going to be obese as you would expect for this degree of insulin resistance,” she notes. “Now, some of the partial patients are obese, but the degree of insulin resistance is much more extreme to their level of obesity.”