What is supported, and what depends on local policy

What is not supported here is any laboratory judgment about whether a drug is working, whether a dose should change, or whether therapy should start or stop. The laboratory verifies specimen integrity, method and reagent-lot continuity, and internal consistency, then communicates a confirmed unexplained trend for clinical correlation. A locally set delta-check limit, hold rule, escalation pathway, LDL-C equation, and Lp(a) assay type are laboratory-specific.

When a lipid trend does not match what the drug class and timing predict, the laboratory rules out specimen, method, and internal-consistency explanations and says clearly what was checked, leaving clinical interpretation of a confirmed unexpected trend to the ordering clinician.