Do you know how your medications impact your lab values?

by Rose Rohloff
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It is known taking medications will impact various lab values. For example, Diuretics e.g. Lasix (Furosemide), can cause low potassium levels. There is an interesting article in Medscape, Which Drugs Interact With Lab Tests? Jun 18, 2019., addressing the fact that certain medications can also interact with the actual processing of certain lab tests causing inaccurate results.  

A recent view of the prescribing information for 1368 prescription drugs found that 134 (9.8%) included information about a specific lab test interaction, 31 (2.3%) stated that the drug did not interfere with lab tests, and four stated that there was no available information.[1] ...

The most common examples of drug-lab test interactions are with urine specimens, because drugs may interfere with the assays for the chemical components in urine. For example, cephalosporins may alter urine glucose and ketone tests. 

By Gayle N. Scott, PharmD DISCLOSURES June 18, 2019
​Medscape Pharmacists, © 2019 WebMD, LLC Any views expressed above are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of WebMD or Medscape. 

​To read the full article, access it here.

Patients, families and caregivers need to be aware of what name, class, internal action, as well as all other medication interactions for every medication, vitamin and supplements being taken.

As Dr. Scott shares as insightful, it is also important before getting lab values done to understand if any medications being taken will impact labs to be processed and cause false results.