JennaRN said:

Complete metabolic panel guide — what each value means during GLP-1 therapy Posting this as an important update for the lab results & biomarkers…

Agreed, and reference ranges are laboratory-specific. Comparing your number to somebody else's range, or to a screenshot from another country, is how people convince themselves something is wrong.

JennaRN said:

Complete metabolic panel guide — what each value means during GLP-1 therapy Posting this as an important update for the lab results & biomarkers…

Filing a mild objection. Mild because I might be wrong; an objection because nobody has addressed the case that does not fit. I would drop the "get everything" instinct further than this thread does. Every extra test is another chance at a false positive, and incidental findings have their own cost in scans, biopsies and worry.

Answering the narrow version, because the broad one does not have a single answer. Quarterly for the first year is convention rather than evidence, and it is defensible for a simple reason: it is roughly the interval over which HbA1c becomes informative again, since it reflects about three months of glycaemia. After the first year, and once doses are stable, annual is reasonable unless something specific is being followed.

HPLC_Greg said:

Agreed, and reference ranges are laboratory-specific.

Can confirm the pattern HPLC_Greg describes. A defensible baseline is short: HbA1c and fasting glucose, a lipid panel with ApoB if you can get it, ALT and AST, creatinine with eGFR, TSH, ferritin and B12, and a full blood count. That set catches the things that change, the things that explain symptoms, and the things that alter the prescribing decision. Almost everything else on the long circulating lists is either invariant, uninterpretable without a specific question, or an incidental finding waiting to cause an unnecessary workup.