This makes them heavier, so they settle faster. The faster your red blood cells settle and fall, the higher your ESR. A high ESR tells your healthcare provider that you may have an active disease process in your body.
You may need this test if you have symptoms of one of the diseases that may cause ESR to go up. You may also need this test if you have already been diagnosed with a disease that causes a high ESR. The test can allow your healthcare provider to see how well you are responding to treatment.
The ESR blood test is most useful for diagnosing or monitoring diseases that cause pain and swelling from inflammation. Other symptoms may include fever and weight loss. These diseases include:. ESR is not used as a screening test in people who do not have symptoms or to diagnose disease because many conditions can cause it to increase.
It might also go up in many normal cases. ESR doesn't tell your healthcare provider whether you have a specific disease. It only suggests that you may have an active disease process in your body. You may have other tests if your healthcare provider is doing this test to diagnose a disease.
One of these tests is call C-reactive protein, or CRP. This test also measures active inflammation in the body. Watching inflammation levels may help doctors measure disease activity as they gauge how well a certain treatment is working. A study of 1, systemic lupus patients found that changes in sedimentation rate were linked with changes in disease activity, but other research has shown conflicting results.
Overweight and obese people, along with older adults, tend to have naturally higher baseline sedimentation rates, says Dr. Get the latest arthritis news in your inbox. Sign up for CreakyJoints and hear about the latest research updates and medical news that could affect you. CreakyJoints is a digital community for millions of arthritis patients and caregivers worldwide who seek education, support, advocacy, and patient-centered research.
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Was This Helpful? Share Facebook Twitter Email. Sed rate tests might be useful when evaluating unexplained fever, some types of arthritis and symptoms that affect your muscles.
Also, they can help confirm a diagnosis of certain conditions, including:. A sed rate test can also help determine the severity of your inflammatory response and monitor the effect of treatment. Because a sed rate test can't pinpoint the problem that's causing inflammation in your body, it's usually accompanied by other blood tests, such as the C-reactive protein CRP test. A phlebotomist, nurse or medical assistant will use a needle to draw blood from a vein, most likely a vein in your arm.
After the test, the site on your arm might be tender for a few hours, but you'll be able to resume most normal activities. Results from your sed rate test will be reported in the distance in millimeters mm that red blood cells have descended in one hour hr.
The upper threshold for a normal sed rate value may vary somewhat from one medical practice to another. Your sed rate is one piece of information to help your doctor check your health. Talk to your doctor about what your sed rate results mean in light of your symptoms and the results of your other diagnostic tests. A number of conditions can affect the properties of blood, thereby affecting how quickly red blood cells sink in a sample of blood. So information about inflammatory disease — what your doctor intends to learn from the sed rate test — can be obscured by the influence of other conditions.
These complicating factors include:. Your doctor will take into account possible complicating factors when interpreting the results of your sed rate test.
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