Practice Takeaway: Providers should be aware that three different body fluids – saliva, blood or urine – can be used to assess adrenal gland function, and should know each method’s advantages and disadvantages, when deciding how to test patients. Inadequate or excessive production or disrupted circadian patterns of cortisol synthesis by the adrenal glands in response to stressors can eventually…
Tags: Dried Urine Testing, Saliva Testing, Blood Spot Testing, Stress, Adrenal and Cortisol
Symptoms of hormonal imbalance can often be challenging to assess. Is your patient exhibiting signs of estrogen dominance because her estrogen is too high or is it due to the progesterone being too low? Is his fatigue because he’s not making enough testosterone or that his adrenal glands are working over-time? Are her imbalanced sex steroids the cause of her depression or is it the low thyroid…
Tags: Hormone Balance, Saliva Testing, Blood Spot Testing, BHRT
As more health care practitioners have understood the need to assess thyroid function based on what is going on at the cellular level, there has been an increasing demand for testing of reverse T3 (rT3), a hormone sometimes referred to as the “hibernation hormone.” However, there is also much confusion about how it fits into the picture of thyroid function, and controversy regarding whether…
Tags: Hormone Balance, Thyroid Health, Research
Thyroid hormones are essential for the normal metabolic functioning of all tissues in the body, and a wide array of symptoms are therefore associated with abnormalities in thyroid hormone production and activation. Even when apparently adequate amounts of thyroxine are produced by the thyroid gland, thyroid function is profoundly affected by anything that disrupts conversion of thyroxine…
Tags: Hormone Balance, Thyroid Health, Research
If you haven't thought about the risks of chemicals in herbicides and pesticides to the health of your family and pets, there's no time like the present. Roadside, clear cut and yard spraying is polluting our environment, with the chemicals becoming air-borne and also getting into ground water. People and pets walking outside are absorbing these chemicals through their skin and bringing it inside…
Tags: Hormone Balance, Breast Cancer, Toxins, Patient Education, Xenoestrogens
Two vitamin D studies were published recently, both utilizing ZRT's testing in dried blood spot. Dried blood spot samples are well suited for research applications because they are equivalent to serum but have the advantage of ease of sample collection, shipping, and storage, which doesn’t require any refrigeration or biohazard labeling. Also, samples are easily identified by details that can…
Tags: Hormone Balance, Vitamin D, Research, Blood Spot Testing
Infertility is a heart breaking condition that affects millions of people around the world or approximately 8-12% of couples. When a couple has been trying over a year (under the age of 35) or over 6 months (over the age of 35) screening for hormonal causes is one of the first recommended steps. This is because sometimes simple adjustments to thyroid and/or progesterone can result in…
When ZRT Saliva test kits arrive at your practice or pharmacy, you probably aren’t wondering about the journey they took to get there. But what if you learned that along the way, their assembly created jobs for individuals with developmental disabilities? ZRT saliva test tubes are hand assembled by a team at Edwards Enterprises, an organization that provides meaningful, self-affirming employment to…
Tags: Saliva Testing, Laboratory Quality
When sex hormones are tested in women either in saliva or blood spot, ZRT test reports give a ratio of progesterone (Pg) to estradiol (E2). The ratio is helpful in clinical practice when both E2 and Pg are within range, yet the patient continues to have symptoms. It is not expected to be normal or used clinically when either E2 and/or Pg are outside of their expected ranges or if the patient does…
Tags: Hormone Balance, Progesterone, Estrogen, Estrogen Dominance, Bioidentical Hormones
As scientific researchers, practitioners and patients bear witness to the increasing evidence of hormone dysfunction in today’s society, Dr. Cobi Slater’s Ultimate Hormone Balancing Guidebook couldn’t come at a better time. Her premise throughout this illuminating book is that the real cause behind the plethora of symptoms plaguing modern adults of all ages can be linked to imbalances within the…
Tags: Weight Management, Patient Education, Hormone Balance, BHRT, Xenoestrogens, Bioidentical Hormones
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