That may run you into run you into a problem. I've pasted below one of the posts i made on that in another thread. Different test, but same principle. Since its not a 24 hour urine specimin, they will take your creatinine levels and use it to correct your values on all the metabolites- so they may not be accurate. One workaround is to take the ratio of things that you are interested in and just focus on relative things whilst ignoring absolute numbers. The correction issue won't affect ratios, so you should ber good there. In your case, hard to figure out if the absoute values will be overestimated or underestimated because i don't know if your creatinine level will be an accurate measure of how dilute your urine really is (in eg. those that don't concentrate urine).
one good thing though is you can look at that number yoiurself- theyll provide it with the test resutls. If it's too low, in principle they should't run the test at all and they will tell you.
how did the samples look to you? clear like water or was it yellow? if the latter, you should be ok, though there's still issue as per the thread below. Did you save a sample for yourself? If so, test it with a test strip so you can see the specific gravity yourself.
i have trouble concentrating urine as well and they wouldn't believe me. i would even go and get urine and blood tests without having had anything to drink all morning - they still wohnt' beleive me and just figured i had alot of water to drink... I had had low urine output yet not conentrated. When i did a 24 hour urine test with doctors data, they refused to beleive it was a 24 hour sample (low output with low creatinine and low concentration)! I t's improved after i increased amount of protein i was eating.
post when you get your results. if i'm still alive
her'es my other post in its entirety though not all applies to you. if you want to find the whole thread you can search for "creatinine"
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While there's no particular reason to suspect lab error, I'd vote for the possibility that the correction for creatinine levels may have artifactually inflated your results.
The mycotoxin test is a one-time urine sample so they use the amount of creatinine in the urine to estimate how dilute it is, which i turn greatly affects the final amount of toxins estimated. In fact, Great Plains lab boasts in their description of the test that the results can differ by 35 fold (!) depending on correction for creatinine. But the problem is that other things affect creatinine besides how much water you drank (dilution). The more muslces you have, the higher the creatinine level. So anyone with low muscle mass, be in from being a small woman, to weak muscles of any cause (deconditioning, atrophy), will have lower creatinine that then is assumed to be from a diluted sample - except that's an error! The end result is that the numbers show up as higher than they really are. Note that if you also have a kidney issue or your urine otherwise has low creatiine having nothing to do with how much water you drank (like some of us), there too, the low creatinine is blamed on water consumption and the results are overestimated. Very large men or those who have greater than average muscles will have the oppoiste problem- the numbers will show up as lower than they really are. Given that they can vary by 35 fold for different amounts of creatitine, they are potentially way way overestimated.
If the test is 24 hour urine, then there's no problem becasue they just measure how much is present int he urine- no calculation based on creatinine is done. But they don't. Also, some labs calculate body surface area and used that in the calculation for one time urine samples, but GPL does not do hat. Another way to get around the issue is to look at ratios rather than absolute amounts works for things like if youre measureing say magnesiusm and potassium, or different amino acids - you can take a ratio. But a ratio is useless in the mycotoxin test.
GPL is expanding their testing of mold related issues. My cynical guess is that they are following the money. Mold/mycotoxin testing is a big money maker for both functional medicine doctors and alternative lab testing companies. So many people, healthy or not, have mold show up. So it's something visible that the practioners can say AHA! - and show the patient the out of range number, which looks impressive. The leads to more testing, and treatments, and retesting - the $$ add up for all involved. Becasue the numbers are often wildly elevated (again, think back to the 35 fold difference based on corrections. as well as high sensitivity of the test) - this gets attention of patient - oh wow- looks more impressive than a borderline high lab result one never knows what to do with it. While some chronically ill do have an issue with mold, i don't think you can tell from these tests who does despite the high numbers.
sorry that got preachy- just trying to get a point across and the words aren't flowing properly.
One test that may be helpful is a test that's second most on my list of alternative tests that have been of value. its the comphrensive stool analysis. Although it's not PCR (so not senstitive to the max), they both culture for fungus and look microscopically. If you ask the folks/counsselors/nurses at great plains lab (using the 30 minute free consult you get for doing a test ) why there was 0 mold growth on the stool analysis and 0 evidence on microscopy, they say the OAT (in this case I asked about OAT) is much more sensitive and will show up before the stool analysis. But too much more sensitive perhaps? does that predict that eventually will show up in stool analysis? If it were really bad, wouldn't it colonize gut? (don't know, perhaps just in respitory system)? .
one other quick thing about this thread. someone mentioned Vit. C level on the OAT and that their result was zero or near zero indicating defiiency. Actually, even the great plains folks in their webinars (free for all) say that it's commonly zero or near zero and does not mean a deficiency; its just that vit c is metabolized very quickly or some such and in no way indicates a deficiency.
