What does the half life of albumin, prealbumin, and transferrin have to do with, when checking labs?

Question

Is one more indicitive of malnutrition than the other, how does that work?

Answer 1

I am not sure about half life.... but albumin can be used to test for malnutirtion that maybe caused by a disease (i.e. hepatic disease) prealbumin tests ones "recovery" from malnutrition (like if you were in the hospital recovering from an illness that caused malnutrition) and transferrin tests a certain iron level in blood.

Answer 2

Prealbumin-shorter half life, thus metabolized quicker. thus reflects short term nutritional deficiencies.

Albumin-longer half life, thus not very indicative of the shorter term nutritional deficiency. Also it's a reverse acute phase reactant--meaning that we are sick, it tends to drop and does not necessarily reflect a nutritional problem.

Transferrin-is not very diagnostic, unless it is also obtained with iron level, total iron binding capacity, b12, folate, ldh, haptoglobin, reticulocyte count --then you could at least diagnose a particular type of anemia.

Hope this helps.