Did You Know?

Did you know that the part of the brain responsible for short-term memory, the hippocampus, is also  responsible for sending chemical messages that tell the adrenal glands to stop producing cortisol?

Cortisol is secreted in a normal stress response, but when the stress is over, the cortisol reaches the hippocampus which puts the brakes on further cortisol production - this is the normal feedback loop.  With chronic stress and/or inflammation, the constant bombardment of cortisol to the hippocampus cells can first damage these cells and eventually cause them to die, which can be a factor in memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease.

Testing Cortisol Levels

The Right and Wrong Way To Do It

Because the adrenal glands produce the stress and inflammation hormone, cortisol, in different amounts at different times of the day, it is vitally important that your cortisol levels be tested throughout the day. The best, and only reasonable way this can be done is by using a home saliva test kit.

The best adrenal salivary test comes from a laboratory named Diagnos-Techs (click here for details and email link) and is called the Adrenal Stress Index (ASI).

Because the adrenal glands’ cortisol production follows a circadian rhythm (i.e., changes throughout the day), it is critical that four saliva samples are taken to have an accurate reading of how well the adrenal glands are functioning. Saliva tests that simply measure one sample are a useless waste of time and money.

As a classic example of this folly, I recently had a patient’s ASI indicate that her cortisol level was normal for the morning sample but very elevated for the noon and early evening samples, and too low for the late evening sample. It is the norm to see these types of ups and downs on an ASI, and had the patient just done a saliva test that only had one sample, her reading would not show the entire picture of what her true cortisol/adrenal function is. In a worst-case scenario, had the patient collected the sample in the morning before she went to work, the reading would have indicated that her adrenal glands were perfectly fine and neither she, nor her doctor, would have a clue as to what was wrong with her.

Where other adrenal saliva tests measure cortisol and DHEA adrenal hormone levels, the ASI also measures blood sugar/glucose levels (cortisol has a major role in blood sugar stability), immune factors (SigA immunoglobulins), and grain sensitivities in the intestinal tract that show if the imbalanced cortisol levels are a response to intestinal tract inflammation.

The ASI also calibrates the status and sensitivity of the hypothalamus and pituitary gland to cortisol and their ability to properly regulate cortisol production. Another hormone, progesterone, is measured to assess the amount of pregnenalone the adrenal glands are using and possibly depriving other hormonal glands from working properly due to hogging most of the available pregnenalone.

The inclusion of these other tests really helps the doctor to understand the health of the adrenal glands and how other systems are being affected, and is vital to deciding the proper course of treatment.

The ASI kit comes with four vials with a small piece of cotton in them, and the vials are marked with the time of day (morning, noon, late afternoon, and late evening) at which you should place the cotton under your tongue to absorb some saliva; the cotton is then replaced in the vial. This is simple, painless (no blood drawing with needles), and inexpensive. When you finish the test you simply send the test kit to the laboratory and they send the test results to your doctor. Best of all, it is very accurate.

This is the kind of test NASA used on its astronauts in space after a Russian cosmonaut returned from the MIR space station and informed them that the stress onboard was so bad that someone would probably get murdered. Not wanting this type of “Houston, we have a problem” situation, NASA decided it was best to monitor the astronauts’ stress hormone levels with the saliva test.

Saliva tests for hormones are far superior to blood tests for several reasons. A blood test merely shows the hormone bound to a protein carrier, and this is not really the amount of hormone your body is actually using. But since the hormone in the saliva has already been fully processed to its useable form before passing through the soft tissue of the saliva glands, it can be measured accurately by testing the saliva. This is especially important when it has to be tested several times a day, as with cortisol, since it would be unreasonable to try to get your blood tested four times a day. Another problem with blood testing is that people often get stressed out in doctor’s offices from either waiting too long to be seen or because they don’t like being punctured by needles. Doing the saliva test in the comfort of your home avoids this inconvenient and potentially stressful experience.

Since 1983, 2,500 research papers have been published supporting salivary hormone testing.

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