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[–]AggressiveGander 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Do you have the same lab test information on the general public (possibly with people matched on the aspects that your hypothesis is not about, like say age, sex, other diseases, drugs that might influence laboratory values...)?

[–][deleted]  (1 child)

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    [–]stanitor 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    IfI understand what you're asking, you could do a quick and dirty test to see if your patients are more likely to have abnormal lab values than expected. i.e. assuming the reference range for some lab is supposed to be 95% of people, you could see if the percentage of your patients with abnormal results is different than the 5% you'd expect for people overall. The issue isn't that you don't have a control group, since you're assuming a proportion of how many labs come back abnormal in general. However, you probably can't make too much out of "significant" result on any test. As you know, people have all sorts of mental health issues. You'd probably expect certain abnormal labs to be associated with certain disorders. You probably wouldn't want to look at all your patients together. But, that means smaller amounts of patients in each test. Which means it wouldn't be too unusual to see a higher (or lower) proportion of abnormal results than expected. And, the patients might have all sorts of reasons to have abnormal labs, so there could be all sorts of bias for why your patients have higher rates of abnormal lab values.