trends | Blackstone Laboratories

Ryan’s Cholesterol

A few years ago I went to our family doctor for a checkup. For most of my life I’d never been one for getting check-ups, but now my insurance company pays for a yearly visit, so I decided to start.

After all the basics, the doctor suggested I do a blood test, because I’m “getting old” (almost 40!?). So after fasting for 24 hours to make sure nothing I ate would skew the results, I headed to their lab to get my blood drawn.

You can imagine my dismay when the nurse called a few days later with my test results — high cholesterol! My initial reaction was shock, followed by a realization that maybe I am indeed getting older.

The nurse said my total cholesterol read 203 and that the doctor wanted me to change my diet and start taking the drug Lipitor. Again, more shock followed by a little confusion as to what exactly 203 meant, and then a wave of depression at the idea of having to take a drug for the rest of my life, along with quitting eggs, butter, and bacon. “Fortunately,” the nurse continued, they offer free Lipitor at the local supermarket pharmacy, like that was supposed to make everything all better.

After a few letting this all sink in, I decided that I was not indeed getting older. In fact, I’d wager that I was the healthiest SOB my doctor had seen all month (based on the state of the patients in her waiting room).

Looking at data

Also, given the fact that I look at data all day long, I began to wonder about the 203 reading. What’s average, what are the units on that, and what was my average cholesterol reading? Maybe I’ve always read high.

After a little more thought, I decided to just ignore my doctor and get retested to see if I can get a trend going. My thinking was, maybe high cholesterol is kind of like high iron in your oil. We normally say that just one high reading isn’t much of a concern. Maybe it was higher before but it’s headed down now, or maybe this level is just normal for you and the way you operate your engine. A trend gives you far more information that just one bad reading. We usually wouldn’t suggest any major changes after one just one high reading, so I was a little disheartened that my doctor would prescribe a lot of life-changing measures based on one test. My course of action would be to get more information about it and check back to see if the high reading was a one-time occurrence or not.

So I had my blood tested again about a month later to see if the first test was accurate. Unfortunately it was, but still, that made me feel a little better about the repeatability of the lab and that test itself.

The vitamin D cure

As luck would have it, that same month I attended a lab training session in Columbus, Ohio at Mettler Toledo (they make an awesome auto-titrator if you’re even in need).

During dinner one night with the other class attendees, we got to talking about Vitamin D and its relationship to cholesterol. My classmate was in the business of testing for Vitamin D levels in food and said that there is a direct relationship between the two. As it turns out, the more Vitamin D you get, the lower your cholesterol goes. And what’s more, Vitamin D is free to us all, being produced naturally by your skin when it’s exposed to sunlight.

This really got me thinking — my first and second blood tests were taken in during the high of winter in the Midwest. A person doesn’t get much sunlight in the winter (at least in Indiana). So maybe if I checked my cholesterol again in summer, it would improve. This started me on a quest to get my blood tested again that summer to see if I could indeed confirm that there was a relationship between Vitamin D and cholesterol.

At the start of September, I called my doctor and requested another blood test, and this time I wanted Vitamin D added as well. After a few days the nurse called with my results. It turns out my Vitamin D level was low at 30, and she wanted me to start taking a supplement to see if I can bring that up (again with the knee-jerk reaction to one reading).

“How about my total cholesterol?” I asked. “Oh, that’s fine at 156.” she stated. This was an eye-opening test because it proved that my cholesterol level did indeed change significantly and I didn’t have to change my diet or take any drugs to artificially lower it.

This also brought up a mildly chilling realization. Suppose I started taking a drug to lower my cholesterol back in February and then had it tested again in September. My cholesterol would have read lower, but everyone would have pointed to the drug as the reason and I’d be stuck taking it for life.

After-market oil additives are a parallel to this in the oil analysis world. A lot of people start to use an additive and after several years start to think it’s the reason their engine is running well. When in reality, chances are very good the engine would still be running fine had they not used the additive.

Trends are key

All of this started back in 2013 and I have accumulated a lot of data since then on my cholesterol and Vitamin D levels. Being in the lab business, I wanted more data before I made any hard and fast statements and I’m still not ready to say one way or the other that the Vitamin D and cholesterol are related. I’m not advocating that you ignore your doctor’s advice (that’s a Stark family virtue), but I am saying that as far as testing goes, it’s not very often that you need to take action just on one bad reading. Trends are important when analyzing data, so be sure to get them even if it takes a little pain.

By the way, during all of this blood testing, I found myself longing for a lab where you could walk in and easily get blood work done without a doctor’s order, one that would send you your results in a nice, easy-to-read format, with an explanation of the data in plain English.

Also, the report would show you an average so you could get an idea about how high or low a reading might be. Whoever could come up with this type of medical lab in real life would be sitting on a gold mine. Now, you may ask, “Why don’t you start one, Blackstone?” and the answer to that is easy—we’re too busy testing your oil.

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Cholesterol follow-up

Back in August 2015 I wrote about cholesterol testing and its parallels to oil analysis. I’m sure you’re all wondering how my health has been, so this is a follow up to that. In the article I stated that there appears to be a connection between Vitamin D and cholesterol and I am here to tell you that I might have been wrong.

My final blood test was on August 7, 2015 and at the time I was taking a Vitamin D supplement to see if it would lower my cholesterol. Well, the supplement worked: my Vitamin D increased to 33, which was an all-time high; however my cholesterol also increased. So barring any sort of lab error that might have occurred, I’m not sure if there is a conclusion or not.

That article received a lot of feedback and I enjoyed all of the comments from our customers, but was especially intrigued by one e-mail I received. He pointed me towards the book “The Great Cholesterol Con,” by Malcolm Kendrick, and while it wasn’t the easiest read I’ve ever come across, it did change my life.

The books states that cholesterol levels aren’t related to heart disease at all and that I should eat anything I like. Well, I’m 43 now and can make up my mind on what I do, and I have to say, I really liked the sound of that. It was the first time I had ever heard anyone say that your diet isn’t related to heart disease and he had that data in his book to back it up.

I’ll admit I never read any of the studies he talked about, though apparently they are all available on the Internet. As for what causes heart disease, well, I won’t spoil the book for you ¾ ha ha just kidding, I’ll spoil it: stress! Reduce that in your life and you’ll be better off. Who can argue with that? Plus now that I don’t have to feel bad about putting butter on my toast, my life just got less stressful.

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Yet another follow-up

A few years ago I wrote an article about how trends in blood tests were just as important as trends in oil analysis. This medical talk spurred a lot of comments and advice which I greatly appreciate, though surprisingly enough, not too many of you seemed concerned about my suicidal-scorn for statin drugs. Still, I’d like to thank all of those was responded and I’d like to pass on one bit of great advice from a doctor/pilot. His best advice for living a long healthy life: Stay off ladders.

Spectrometry: The Marvel of the Lab

We occasionally get questions about how oil analysis works. You send your oil to us and you get a report back, but what happens in the lab? Is it magic? Some sort of voodoo? What happens to the oil that allows us to determine what’s in it?

At the heart of oil analysis is a spectrometer. It is the machine that allows us to quantify wear metals, additives, and contaminants in oils, making oil analysis a useful service in predicting potential problems in engines and machines of all types.

The plasma in the process

A spectrometer can be aimed at a star to determine what elements may exist in the star, if all the star’s light is being generated by the star (rather than reflected off the star). Spectrometry works on the same principle, but we have to first create the light. We do this by converting the actual oil into light energy. This is done by injecting the oil into something called plasma. You can think of plasma as a flame, since it looks like a green flame. But plasma is much hotter than a normal flame, and it needs to be in order to do its work. The plasma we use has a temperature of about 10,000° C. Plasma is actually the highest state of energy (the states of energy being solid, liquid, gas, and plasma).

Different types of plasma have been used over the last several decades that oil analysis has been commercially available. Early on, plasma was electrically generated as an arc. The drawback of an electric arc is that as it is generated, it can vary in intensity because the electrical part generating the arc erodes. The erosion causes changes in system resistance, resulting in variable plasma intensity. When using plasma to read the intensity of light from elements, it’s best if the plasma’s light is constant. Otherwise, errors can be introduced into the process.

Inductive coupled plasma, known in the trade as ICP, works by converting argon gas into plasma. So long as the argon pressures and flow rates don’t change, and the power causing the plasma’s generation is steady, the intensity of the plasma stays the same. This gives ICP spectrometry the industry gold star for incredible accuracy.

The rainbow connection

To understand what happens next, think of a rainbow. When you see a rainbow, what you’re really seeing is moisture droplets in the air acting as prisms to separate the various wavelengths of light into individual colors that can be seen by the human eye.

A spectrometer uses this same principle. A prism inside the machine takes the “light” that’s generated by injecting the oil through the plasma and separating it into the different light frequencies of the elements. Each beam of light is then directed to a tiny slit on what is called an aperture plate. The aperture plate is a thick metal device, about 10 inches wide by 18 inches long, and the slits engraved in it are finer than a human hair. The aperture plate allows us to measure the intensity of each beam, using a device known as a photomultiplier tube.

A photomultiplier tube senses light and reacts to its intensity by vibrating faster as the light intensifies. Voila! By placing a photomultiplier tube at one of the slits on the aperture plate, we can get a digital readout of the intensity of light for any particular element in an oil sample. However, as amazing as this process is, the spectrometer is dumb as a box of rocks if the operator doesn’t install a program that will let the computer strut its stuff.

Let’s recap what we’ve learned so far. We know that argon is turned into extremely hot plasma, which burns the oil completely, turning it into light waves. The spectrometer refracts this light with a prism and then optically directs the distinct light frequencies of each of the elements to a slit in an aperture plate. A photomultiplier tube travels to each of the light slits and “reads” the amount of light there by vibrating. This marvelous arrangement still can’t tell us what we want to know without further instructions.

Setting the standard

The next step in determining what is in the oil (and in what quantities) comes in the form of “standards.” You can think of standards like your daily vitamin. Just as you can buy vitamins that contain a certain amount of iron, the iron standard (which is a liquid) contains a certain, “standard” amount of iron. You can buy standards that contain however much of any element you need.

Each standard has a certain amount of a particular element in it. If we want to know, for example, how much iron is in an oil sample, we need to give the spectrometer something to measure against. This allows it to know how many vibrations to count to determine how much iron is present. The first standard we use is a blank — that is, a zero standard — that has no iron in it. At the iron slit in the aperture plate, the photomultiplier tube vibrates at a certain rate per second. Then it remembers that rate as zero. Then, for example, a 100 ppm iron standard is fed into the machine, and again the photomultiplier tube vibrates, but this time at a faster rate. The machine remembers this rate is equal to 100 ppm. Setting the standards in the spectrometer is a process is known as calibration, and it’s something we do many times each day. It allows the spectrometer to know what standards it should be measuring against.

The spectrometer records each element’s information into a chart and uses the chart to determine how much of each element is an in actual oil sample. This process, where the photomultiplier tube travels to each slit and vibrates, repeats for each element we want to measure in an oil sample. The vibrations are translated to ppm (parts per million) readouts using the charts that were set up by the standards. Suddenly the spectrometer looks like a genius! It vaporizes the oil and tells us how much of each element is present in the sample.

There are 72 elements on the periodic chart that make enough light, when injected into the plasma, to be read on a spectrometer. Some elements make lots of light and are easy to analyze accurately. Others, like tin, make very little light and are more difficult to accurately gauge. This, along with differences in standards, calibration, and the set-up of different spectrometers, is the reason that you may find differences in the results coming from different laboratories.

A spectrometer is like your television or your car — you don’t have to understand how it works to use it. There is only one answer to how much iron, copper, or any other element may exist in an oil sample. We think ICP spectrometry has the best shot at giving you the correct answer. It is accurate and repeatable, which is a requirement for giving you an accurate appraisal of how your engine is doing mechanically based on its wear properties.