Blog — Testing Methods

  Tracy Tranchitella, ND, ZRT Laboratory If you have ever experienced a near-miss collision or other accident, you have likely felt the rush of adrenaline coursing through your veins almost instantly. In that moment, your heart rate, blood pressure, and respiratory rate increased, your pupils dilated, and your brain felt immediately more alert. These are the effects of adrenaline, otherwise known as epinephrine, which is produced in the adrenal medulla when we encounter a significant stressor.  In a “life or death” situation, the stress response can literally save our lives by readying us to act and facilitating a physiological response...

Saliva testing is used for measuring hormones like cortisol, estrogen, progesterone, DHAES and testosterone, and its non-invasive collection asks patients to spit into a plastic tube. This sampling method allows patients to collect saliva at home at specific times, which is important for accurately measuring hormone levels. Why do we test hormones in saliva? Steroid hormones in the bloodstream are 95-99% bound to carrier proteins, and in this form are unavailable to target tissues. Saliva testing measures the amount of hormone available to target tissues – the bioavailable amount. For this reason, saliva testing better relates to specific symptoms of excess...

The current concern over the dangerous Ebola virus has heightened awareness about infections that can be transmitted via contact with body fluids. The last thing we want is to be exposed to body fluids from others infected with dangerous organisms and, ironically, a likely place to encounter such fluids is the phlebotomy station at the doctor’s office. How can exposure to other people who may be sickened with an infectious agent be minimized? One way to minimize exposure is to use at-home sample collection methods, a hallmark of ZRT lab testing, which ensure seclusion and don’t require samples to be...