 Hey fam, Raif Derrazy here and today I'm going to be going over my lab results from my most recent HIV doctors visit. If you haven't watched that vlog yet, I'll put a card up so you can go and watch that now or watch it after either way. But now I'm gonna, I've got my lab results and I'm gonna go through them and kind of give you a breakdown of what it is that I get back from the doctor after I do my blood work and my urinalysis. All right, let's go. Okay, so this is the heal out page where I go and I can, you know, check on my appointments. I can message my doctor, I can do all sorts of things. And it also is a place where I can check on my lab results. So these are my lab results from December 7. There's more from previous appointments, but these are the ones that we're going to focus on for today. By the way, in a previous video, I went through every single lab result and all the little acronyms and googled it and found out what they stood for and what what the lab results were actually telling me and I broke it down really specifically. If you haven't seen that you can watch that I'll link I'll put a card up for that right now. But I'm not going to do that this time. Basically, I just look at the the general overview of all my lab results as long as they are in the good range that I'm happy, I don't really I'm not really concerned. If it's in red, then I kind of pay attention and then I then I want to know a little bit more. So okay, we're going to start with the lipid panel with reflex to direct LDL. Okay, so this is my lipid panel. Immediately I see this red for LDL cholesterol. This is typically considered your quote unquote bad cholesterol. But it serves its purpose, of course. That's in the red. I believe the target reference range is less than 100. So it's a little bit over. My triglycerides are in a good range 96 wants to be less than 150, HDL greater than or equal to 40. That's great. My total cholesterol, however, is at 184, which is less than that 200. So it's a little concerning, I would like my LDL to be in a healthier range, but overall, not something to get crazy concerned about. Since the start of the pandemic, I've gained like 3035 pounds of fat. So it makes sense that my LDL cholesterol would be a little high. As I, you know, work out and eat right and all that stuff and correct it, then I'm sure it will go back to normal. Okay, moving on, glucose is high. It should be between 65 and 99. It's at 114. So when it's between a hundred and 125, it's consistent with pre diabetes and should be confirmed with a follow up test. So this is a note of concern that I might be pre diabetic. You know, the doctor never mentioned it before. I don't know if it's something I should be worried about either way. Again, I'm not too concerned because I know that my lifestyle is going to change my fitness and my diet. So I'm fairly confident that that's going to self correct. And if not, then we'll deal with it then. So my next appointment will be in six months. And if it hasn't been corrected by then, if I'm not seeing improvement, then I might broach the topic then and be like, what can I do about this? What can we do? Everything else looks good. creatinine. This is a marker that a lot of people get concerned about with taking creatine because taking creatine can elevate creatinine levels. This is something that my doctor has explained to two before. And high creatinine is an indicator of possible, I think it's kidney function problems. But it's correlated, but it doesn't necessarily mean that there is a problem with your kidneys. So creatine can make this go high, which basically what that means is if your creatinine level is high, and you've been taking creatine, it doesn't necessarily mean that you have kidney problems. At that point, you would do a follow up test that actually really test the kidney directly to see if you have an issue. And my doctor said sometimes when patients have a high creatinine level and they've been taking creatine, and then they do the follow up test to test the actual kidney itself, there isn't an issue found. It's just that the creatinine level has been elevated from creatine. So that's why I've been okayed with it. And regardless, I've never had a high creatinine that I can remember. Okay, on to the next. Okay, CBC this has to do with the blood cells. Everything is good here. All black, no reds. So I'm happy. Good stuff. Your analysis. All right, the color is yellow. That's a good sign. It's not red or green or something weird. Everything else is black. No concerns. So I mean, this is how how quickly these days I kind of just glance through and make sure that everything looks right. Nothing to worry about. On to the next RPR. Okay, so this is my RPR with reflexive, tighter and confirmatory testing. I don't let's Google this one. What is this for? Oh, it's for syphilis. Got it. So there was a point in my past where I did have syphilis. And this confirms that it is found my body is reactive for it. So my understanding with syphilis is that once you have it, it's always going to come up on tests. It doesn't mean that it's actively in your body, you know, replicating or anything like that. But you're going to have some kind of marker in your body that lets you know that you had, at least syphilis at some point. Okay, on to the next lymphocyte subset panel. All right, so here's some of the juicy HIV stuff that we like to get into. My percentage CD4 is at 38. We want it to be between 30 and 61%. A lot of you who have HIV know about HIV know that tracking your CD4 cell count is kind of an important measure that we follow up on. So my absolute CD4 plus cells is at 579. The ideal range is between 490 and 1740. And for me personally, my range tends to fluctuate between, I would say the low 40s to up to around 750. And I've never seen it, I don't think, go higher than that. For some people, their normal range is 1000 plus. It's different for everybody. So do not worry if you feel like your CD4 count should be higher. As long as it's in the healthy range, it's not something you really have to worry about. It's not something you can really control either. I mean, you can do all the kind of secondary tertiary things around your health to boost your immune system, to make the most ideal conditions for your body to be strong, your immune system to be strong, but you can't directly influence the CD4 count in your body. So e-write, be healthy, reduce stress, get enough sleep, hydration, all that. All the normal stuff will help your body to hopefully have a healthy, strong CD4 count. Anyway, 579, good to go. Vitamin D, I don't remember having done this before. My value is at 41. Ideal range is at 30 to 100. You know, I've read articles before that say that a lot of people have a vitamin D deficiency. I guess it looks like below 20 is deficiency. 2029 is insufficient. Optimal is greater than or equal to 30. Okay, so I'm in the optimal range. That's important. And the reality is I do supplement with vitamin D3 daily with my supplements. It's something that my coach had me do when I was doing competition prep for bodybuilding. And I figured why not continue that, even when I'm not in competition prep. Vitamin D deficiency is an issue. And if I can supplement it, then great. I bet in the summer, this number goes a lot higher. It'll be interesting to see that. Okay, on to the next. We've got HIV one RNA quantitative real time PCR. All right, here we go. Viral load is less than 20 not detected HIV one RNA quantitative PCR is less than 1.3 not detected. This is the coveted undetectable that we like to achieve as someone living with HIV because once you're undetectable, what does that mean? Means you're untransmittable, which means after six months of being undetectable, you can no longer transmit the HIV virus to someone else sexually, which is that's a great advancement. And let's see, RPR titer. Okay, and this is also related to syphilis. So if you've had syphilis before and you're reactive, they will track your RPR titer. I don't know exactly. I can't explain it. But basically, you want this ratio to be as close to one one to one as possible. If it starts to go, what is it one to two, one to four, one to 16, one to 32, I think something like that, then that means the syphilis is active in your body. And it's, it's doing bad things. And that's not good. And that means that there needs to be some medical intervention. And so one to one means it's, it's not doing anything in the body. And I'm good to go, but they track that because apparently that can happen. Interesting, right? Okay. Okay, last but not least, FTA ABS, I have no idea what that means. So saying that I've been diagnosed with syphilis. That's all I need to really be concerned with about that. The important thing is the titer. As long as that the titer is one to one, it's an under control, it's good. Then there's really nothing to worry about. And it kind of just does that on its own. So that's that, that those are my lab results. I know I didn't go into great detail, but you get the gist of it. And you can see clearly my health is not perfect. There's stuff that I can work on. And it's good to know just what, you know, is it optimal and what you can work on so that you can be proactive in combating that and making sure that you are living your healthiest, happiest, most vibrant life possible and not waiting until some ailment or sickness comes along and then trying to patch that up after the damage has been done, right? It's so much better in the long term if we can do things that are preventative. And so this helps with that. Wow, it's gotten so dark. The sun's going down when I didn't realize. Okay, I hope this was helpful, enlightening, educational, reassuring, comforting to see what you might expect if you or a loved one has HIV. Or if you're just curious about, you know, some of the things that people living with HIV come across in their day to day. And yeah. Okay, so I finally remembered to do the comment of the day. So today's comment of the day comes from the YouTube comments. And I'm sorry, I know I'm going to butcher this name. Aniket Naval, Naval, Aniket Naval says, Hey, I found out my HIV status just two weeks ago. The news came like a wrecking ball for me. So I have done a lot of research to educate myself about everything and your videos really helped. Can you please do some research on American gene technologies HIV cure? I have done a lot of research on their cure and process, but hearing it from your perspective would be really helpful for not just me, but everyone. Thank you Aniket for that thoughtful comment. Thank you for sharing with me and with the community about your HIV diagnosis. The more people like myself and like you speak up and share are the realities of what it is to be living with HIV, the more we can combat stigma. And the more people will be willing to share their own experiences and journeys living with HIV and not make it a scary thing that we hash and don't talk about openly. Okay, so this is the American gene technologies website. I believe this is what you were referring to for the HIV functional cure American gene technologies. Honestly, I haven't looked into this and I'm just doing it now as I was reviewing your comment. So this looks like it's in phase one human trial. And I believe I saw somewhere that it modifies the CD4 white blood cell, which normally is destroyed by HIV and makes it so that it's resistant to HIV. Yes, here we go. Participants, participants are infused once with their own CD4T cells that were enriched for cells capable of reacting to HIV and genetically modified to resist infection. This is a first in human study of for a GT 103 dash T the primary endpoint is safety. That's the gist of it. You know, there's a lot of honestly, there's a lot of potential cures out there and a lot of different methodologies that different researchers are using to try to combat HIV. This is this is awesome. It's great that this is happening. My personal since you asked me for my personal insight in it is that I don't hyper follow any one of these just because there are so many and also because I'm so focused on my life and living well and living happy and living healthy, that I know that this is going on in the background and I know we're going to get there sooner than later in our lifetime. So I'm not too concerned with it really I'm not waiting for an HIV cure. And I think that that's a good mindset for me at least because I can kind of move on with my life. You know, my, my medication Big Tar V works really well. I have no noticeable side effects. I'm undetectable. I'm untransmittable. So really HIV doesn't really have a practical, real world impact on my day to day life. It just doesn't. So I don't even think of it like that. So if there's a cure, great, that's awesome. Do I want to be aware of things that are kind of in the works? Yes, of course, that's great, especially because I want to share it with you guys. So and I appreciate you bringing it up so that I could share this. And you guys should look this up American gene comms where you can find this website and dive into it more. I'm not going to go too deep into it today. Just because I just want to get across the point that while I'm conscious, aware of different trials that are in the works and different possible cures, my focus is on my life and my day to day and being happy and healthy. And I, I strongly recommend a lot of you who are maybe like too hyper focused with the cure, the cure, the cure that you start to live in the present moment where we are today and what you have control over today, which is, you know, taking your medication and eating right and being healthy and active and getting sleep and reducing the stress in your life, going after your goals and your dreams and things that are important to you. That's what really matters because sitting around and digging deep for all this stuff and hoping for a cure every day isn't going to make it happen any quicker. And I, and this isn't to comment on the person who made this comment, because I know that's not what you were saying, you were just bringing this to my attention. And I greatly appreciate it. I love it when you guys tell me about this stuff so that I can be aware and so that I can help share it with you guys. But that's my take on it. That's kind of my mentality on it. Every once in a while, I will do kind of a deep dive into something that is really potentially groundbreaking, just because I know that that can be a sign of hope for a lot of you folks as well. So that's that. Thank you for the comment. I greatly appreciate it. I'm going to try to do these on every video. All right, I'll say it one more time, like this video if you liked it, subscribe if you haven't already hit that bell so you get stayed notified of new videos and I'll see you guys soon.