I would very much appreciate your help and advice. My doctor is no help and I have privately tested and self-diagnosed over the last three years. I'm not sure if age matters in relation to these results but I am 72. I have followed the B12 Deficiency protocol on the FB page Pernicious Anaemia/B12 deficiency for the last 2 years. I recently found that I have high levels of both Hashimoto's antibodies and am looking to use NDT (following both STTM and TPAUK). STTM advised testing adrenals and I have used the Blue Horizons saliva test. The results, apart from the waking (7.15), look low and the 12.00 is marked Low, all of which which suggests I need to build up the adrenals a bit before taking NDT and possibly iodine. The results were:
Cortisol (Saliva) 7.15 14.00 (6.0 - 21.0 nmol/L
)
Cortisol (Saliva) 12:00 L <1.5 (1.5 - 7.6 nmol/L
)
Cortisol (Saliva) 14:00 <1.50 (0 - 5.5 nmol/L
)
Cortisol (Saliva) 16:00 2.03 (0 - 5.5 nmol/L
)
Cortisol (Saliva) 18:00 <1.5 (0 - 4.5 nmol/L
)
Cortisol (Saliva) 23.15 <1.5 (0 - 2.0 nmol/L)
Would much appreciate your feedback. Thank you.
Written by
maridwt
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Are you experiencing other symptoms of low cortisol such as weight loss, nausea, diarrhea? If you are then you need to see your GP to have formal testing for coritsol in case you have Addison's disease.
Thanks, Pauline. I'm not losing weight, I'm putting it on, which I thought was possibly down to the Hashimoto's. And I don't have nausea and diarrhea, except when I've had a bug which the rest of the family have also had. My GP is not helpful. I wondered if the results showed some adrenal fatigue which I felt I would need to address before embarking on the thyroid treatment in order to get the most out of that.
You'll have to do some extrapolation to work out how that corresponds to your six results, but it does give you some idea of how bad your results are.
I would also say that the reference ranges for the last four results are nonsensical. I would guess that the top of the range is fine, but the bottom of the range is zero. A cortisol level of zero is probably only healthy for a corpse. The companies doing cortisol saliva tests only introduced these reference ranges starting at zero two or three years ago. Before that they had numbers greater than zero for the bottom of every range.
Just as an example, these are the ranges for a test I had done in 2014 :
Cortisol – Sample 1 – 8.45am nmol/L 12.0 - 22.0
Cortisol – Sample 2 – 1.15pm nmol/L 5.0 - 9.0
Cortisol – Sample 3 – 5.45pm nmol/L 3.0 - 7.0
Cortisol – Sample 4 – 10.30pm nmol/L 1.0 - 3.0
Total Daily Cortisol nmol/L 21.0 - 41.0
Now, obviously the reference ranges I got from a test 4 years ago are totally irrelevant to you, but I just wanted to show you an example of how reference ranges used to look.
Despite my reservations about the reference ranges for your test, they do make it clear that you have a problem.
There are prescribed medicines that people get given for low cortisol, but I don't know anything about them or how easy they are to get hold of. I'm trying to think of people who've taken meds to replace low cortisol, and I can think of two who might be able to help : greygoose and Angel_of_the_North
.
If you were to show your results to a doctor I'm not sure what reaction you would get. I think a lot of people get cortisol saliva tests dismissed because doctors claim that the NHS doesn't use these tests for measuring cortisol. But that isn't true.
If you like the look of it, download it. It's on a website that might disappear.
Have you ever had cortisol measured with a blood test? If you haven't then ask your doctor for one. Assuming he agrees to do it, arrange the test for first thing in the morning, fast overnight before the test (but water can be drunk freely), be as calm as possible before and during the test. Talk as little as possible. Don't get into arguments with anyone. Give yourself plenty of time to get to the test. Stroll to the test rather than walking. Don't discuss these arrangements with your doctor. He'll tell you that you have wasted your time because none of these things make a difference, but they do.
.
If you get nowhere with the doctor and your blood test is described as "normal", then you either have to source your own meds online without a prescription - something I know nothing about for low cortisol. Or you will need to start investigating how to raise cortisol with adrenal glandulars, learn which supplements you need, and learn how to improve adrenal health. That is a big subject on its own, so it would be worth asking about that if the need arises.
Thanks so much for all this, humanbean, it is very kind of you to give me so much detail. My GP practice is less than helpful unfortunately (and in the very rural area where I live there is no other choice), so thank you for all the links. The advice on how to prepare for a test is very useful, too, as it would apply to a home blood test as much as going to the surgery for one. It's very interesting that the ranges have changed, and I wonder why that's happened - I did think it was a little strange for the bottom of the range to be 0! I can see from the ranges that were used on your test that there is no doubt my results are low. I need to start investigating!
Sadly, you can't say your results are low based on the reference ranges given for my test. I was just showing you how the bottom of the ref ranges used to look - they were all greater than zero, and they made more sense. But you can't compare the results from one test and the reference ranges from another test and expect to learn anything sensible from the comparison.
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