NurseLeah_Nash said:

It is worth asking what the claim would look like if it were false.

Adding the part of the answer the thread has not reached. 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.

The figures, for anyone assembling their own picture. The boring version of this is the one that works, and the boring version is: measure a baseline, change one variable, wait, measure again under the same conditions. Nobody wants that answer and it is still the answer.

Following on from NurseLeah_Nash — and this may be the naive question:

What actually belongs on a baseline panel, as opposed to the enormous list that gets pasted around here?

PeptideChemSF said:

The boring version of this is the one that works, and the boring version is: measure a baseline, change one variable, wait, measure again under the…

I am going to disagree with the direction of travel here. The thread has converged on the tidiest answer rather than the best-supported one, and those are not the same thing.

If somebody has the primary source to hand I would rather cite it than paraphrase it.

OP back with an update, since a thread like this is useless without one.

Took the whole panel in rather than the one flagged line, and the conversation lasted two minutes instead of generating three more tests.