Abnormal ALT and AST

Hi, sorry to hear your husband’s liver enzymes are abnormal. I dealt with this recently myself, and with all the symptoms and rampant googling I couldn’t help but leap straight to the conclusion that I had something terrible. Turned out it was just a bit of harmless inflammation that went away in due time. Worrying and getting anxious can definitely make things worse for both of you, and can cause all sorts of things like dizziness, nausea and other nasty symptoms that could easily be mistaken for something much worse. I definitely know how hard it can be to convince yourself it’s nothing serious. Elevated liver enzymes do mean there’s inflammation in the liver or that something is wrong, but there’s a reliable chance it’ll end up being something non-threatening. Best wishes to both of you.

My understanding is that ALT and AST blood tests do not necessarily measure liver function.  They measure cell damage that *might* indicate liver damage.  So, for instance, if your husband had just worked out with weights before his blood test or does so regularly, that could easily account for the elevated result.  I think that most primary care physicians do not know about this correlation with exercise, but if those are the only two numbers that were elevated, I really would not worry very much.  If he exercises a lot, you might look at literature on liver function tests and athletes/exercise.  I wish him the best results from his ultrasound.  

I also found out when this happened to me that only 1 in 10 people who have only these two numbers elevated in a blood panel ultimately end up having anything wrong with them, so wanted to add that.