How are your adrenal glands doing? Adrenal Fatigue Test is a good assessment to determine your adrenal hormones and adrenal health!
Adrenal Fatigue can be the cause of your fatigue, anxiety, depression, weight gain, hormonal imbalance, infertility, diabetes & blood sugar imbalances, exhaustion, low sex drive for women and men, sleep issues and immune system dysregulation such as allergies and chronic infections!
All of us experience stress on some level, some stress is healthy and totally normal. However, over time, stress can become chronic and impact our overall health. Adrenal fatigue is a state of low resilience to stress and is dependent on many factors. Generally, it is a cortisol imbalance, also known as “mild adrenocortical deficiency”.
Your adrenal glands are responsible to produce cortisol, adrenaline and sex hormones. When you are physically or emotionally stressed, your body shifts into producing more cortisol and puts itself into a ‘fight or flight’ mode. The increase in cortisol happens due to low resiliency to stress, as higher cortisol allows you to sustain the energy you need for that time. Over time, this results in a few possibilities – difficulty breaking down your stress hormone making you more anxious (“wired but tired”), which is a state of too much cortisol. After a while, your adrenals get tired and you will shift into extreme exhaustion (low cortisol).
Neither high cortisol or low cortisol are good as both have a huge impact on your hormones and health factors. This is why adrenal testing is important, as it will show your exact hormonal patterns and tendencies.
The Adrenal Fatigue Test involves measuring your active and inactive stress hormones. The reason why it’s more accurate than blood work is because the cortisol in your blood provides a measurement of POTENTIAL levels of hormones that will get to your tissues. Dr. Tali uses salivary cortisol testing as salivary cortisol is more of an accurate representation of the active and inactive hormones that reached your tissues – this is key!
Salivary adrenal hormone testing is also painless as it involves collecting your saliva in a tube at your own comfort from home. Additionally, it provides 4-5 different readings of your active and inactive cortisol levels throughout the day: wake up, 30 minutes after wake up, 60 minutes after wake up, afternoon, evening and night readings. In comparison, blood work of cortisol testing only provides the levels of the time you took the blood test, not throughout the day! This is important as potentially adrenal fatigue and imbalances can be missed if we are just relying on one blood work reading in a day.
Adrenal Health Hormonal Testing provides a graph of your hormones throughout the day mapping out a pattern. Dr. Tali selects individualized herbal medicine and supplements to tailor them to your cortisol patterns. This test provides not only the active and inactive stress hormones (cortisol and cortisone) but also their metabolites. There is an option to add melatonin to your testing if you have insomnia or sleep issues.
You need a curious licensed health care professional such as a Naturopathic Doctor in order to dig deeper to the root cause of your hormonal imbalances. Dr. Tali strives to make her patients become more resilient to stress, as this is the root cause to most health issues. Your symptoms will be addressed but it’s also important to treat the root cause of your adrenal fatigue – WHY did it happen in the first place. Realigning the hormonal pathways that were affected by your cortisol imbalance is also important.
We live in a world where we aren’t meant to: stress too much, eat junk food, sleep too little and be exposed to toxins. Therefore, it’s important to adapt your body to your lifestyle – doesn’t that sound ideal?
You will be provided with a kit and 5 tubes to collect your saliva. The kit will contain everything you need, instructions as well as a pre-paid shipping label for you to mail the sample back to the lab. The turn around time for results is about 2 weeks.
Depending on your symptoms, Dr. Tali may combine your Adrenal Fatigue Test / Salivary Cortisol Test with a Female Hormone Comprehensive Testing or Male Hormone Comprehensive Testing (read more here). These tests complete the picture to your hormonal pathways by showing active & inactive ratios as well as metabolites by a very detailed in depth analysis.
Have any further questions about Adrenal Fatigue Hormonal assessment?
Feel free to contact Dr. Tali Troyansky ND, Toronto Naturopathic Doctor, to discuss whether you should be tested.