Metabolic Discovery Comprehensive Panel

You may want the Metabolic Discovery Comprehensive Panel if your numbers don’t “match” the way you expect—like a hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) that looks fine but your fasting glucose runs high, or home glucose readings that look improved while your A1c lags behind. A multi-marker panel can help explain those mismatches by showing both short-term glucose, longer-term glucose exposure, and insulin patterns side by side.

This panel is also useful if you’re changing something meaningful—starting or adjusting GLP-1/GIP therapy, changing carbohydrate intake, increasing activity, or trying to protect muscle while losing weight. When weight changes quickly, single markers can move in confusing ways; a broader panel helps you separate “expected shifts” from signals that need attention (for example, dehydration affecting kidney markers, or rapid fat loss affecting liver enzymes).

You might also consider this panel if you have cardiometabolic risk factors (family history of type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, fatty liver, high triglycerides, low HDL, or a history of gestational diabetes) and you want a baseline that captures both glucose-insulin physiology and atherogenic (plaque-forming) lipid risk.

This panel supports clinician-directed care and shared decision-making. It can help you ask better questions and track trends, but it is not meant for self-diagnosis or changing prescriptions without medical guidance.

Vitals Vault lets you order a comprehensive metabolic-focused lab panel so you can see multiple, connected markers from a single blood draw. That matters when you’re trying to understand why you feel stuck (plateaus, fatigue, cravings) or why one lab value doesn’t align with another.

After you get results, you can use PocketMD to organize the story your labs are telling—what looks like insulin resistance versus medication effects, what changes may be expected during weight loss, and which follow-up tests or retest timing make sense. This is especially helpful if you’re monitoring GLP-1/GIP therapy and want a clinician-aligned way to think about dosing changes, side effects, and cardiometabolic risk.

If you’re already tracking glucose at home (fingerstick or CGM), this panel can complement that data by adding longer-term markers (like A1c), fasting insulin, and lipid particle risk markers that home devices can’t provide.

You can also use this panel as a baseline and then retest to confirm whether changes in nutrition, training, sleep, or medications are moving the right markers in the right direction.

The Metabolic Discovery Comprehensive Panel is a bundled lab panel that measures multiple blood markers related to glucose regulation, insulin signaling, cholesterol and lipoproteins, liver and kidney function, and systemic inflammation. Instead of treating “metabolic health” as one lab value, the panel looks at several connected systems that often move together.

Metabolic health is largely about how your body handles energy—especially how efficiently you move glucose from the bloodstream into cells, how much insulin you need to do that, and how your liver packages and exports fat (triglycerides and cholesterol particles). When insulin resistance develops, you can see a recognizable pattern across markers: fasting insulin tends to rise, triglycerides often rise, HDL may fall, liver enzymes can drift up, and glucose markers may worsen over time.

If you’re using GLP-1/GIP medications or making major lifestyle changes, the “system view” matters. For example, A1c may improve while LDL-C rises transiently during rapid weight loss, or kidney markers may look worse if you were dehydrated on the day of the draw. A comprehensive panel helps you interpret those shifts in context rather than reacting to a single out-of-range result.

This panel does not replace individualized medical care. It is a practical way to gather the core data that clinicians commonly use to assess cardiometabolic risk, monitor therapy response, and decide whether you need more targeted follow-up testing.