Blog — testing hormone

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...

Over 25 million women a year worldwide will enter menopause and make a decision about hormone replacement therapy. For healthcare practitioners, what dosage and what formulation these hormones take is open to debate. After many years of teaching and talking to practitioners, I’ve learned that: there are many strategies for approaching dosages, everyone thinks that theirs is the best, most of them work well for many patients but not all, and that we really, really need more research. There is very little to no research on different dosing strategies. Standard bioidentical hormones have research behind them, but they are looking at serum testing and...