Marc,
Your IgG is your "involved" immunoglobulin. All the other immunoglobulins are "uninvolved" (aka background). But knowing if one or more uninvolved immunoglobulins are suppressed is important. When you have one or more suppressed uninvolved immunoglobuins, it is known as immunoparesis and has prognostic significance.
Also, your kappa free light chain is your involved free light chain and your lambda free light chain is the uninvolved one. In total, you have a IgG-kappa type plasma cell disorder.
Note that you also want to track your actual kappa, lambda and kappa/lambda ratio values and not simply know that one may be increased or one may be decreased or normal. These values can be found on a serum free light chain assay. However, a high kappa, coupled with a low lambda and high ratio, could possibly signal bone marrow suppression. See
this page for an explanation of bone marrow suppression.
If the lab knew that one or more of your background immunoglobulins were suppressed, they must have run what is known as a quantified immunogblobulin test. If they know that your kappa is increased and your lambda is decreased, they also ran a serum free light chain assay. So, you should try to get copies of those tests, along with your metabolic panel and CBC tests.
Different items in a report use different units of measure. Also, different labs and different countries use different units of measure for the same items, so it can get confusing. It has nothing to do with metric versus non-metric standards. It's just that there is no consensus between labs, equipment and countries. I can get results from Labcorp using one unit of measure and results from Quest Diagnostics using a different unit of measure for the same item. You just have to learn to convert when necessary.
Hope this helps.
