NurseKim_ATL said:

Extending the interval and reducing the dose are pharmacologically different.

The regain framing needs pushing back on. Two thirds regained means one third did not, and the trial provided no ongoing support to either group. Treating regain as pharmacologically inevitable is as unsupported as treating maintenance as automatic.

Worth separating that from the baseline and follow-up panel, which this thread keeps folding into the same question. They behave differently and the advice does not transfer.

Adding the numbers, since they settle part of this. Post reference ranges alongside numbers when you share them. Units differ by country — glucose and lipids especially — and half the confusion in these threads is unit mismatch rather than disagreement.

COA_Karl said:

The regain framing needs pushing back on.

There is a second half to this that has not been said yet. The single most useful discipline is bringing the whole panel to a clinician rather than one flagged value. One out-of-range result in isolation generates anxiety and unnecessary tests; the same result next to the trend and the rest of the panel usually generates a shrug.

A narrower follow-up, since the general answer is now clear:

Whether extending the interval works as well as reducing the dose, since they are not the same intervention pharmacologically?

Reporting back.

I went to a lower dose rather than a longer interval on the strength of the trough argument in this thread, and the difference in how even it feels is obvious.