I got my cortisol results and they are well whacky.
Very high on waking and 12 midday (not surprising as i always have lots of get up and go even if i m totally exhausted! Weird i know).
Then normal for 4pm and high normal for bedtime.
Bedtime surprising as i have a lot of trouble getting to sleep and always feel totally wired no matter how tired/exhausted i am; but i think you recommend low normal is best for bedtime.
Since starting T3, I sleep deeply once i AM finally asleep, though.
Hope this all makes sense!
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Rachel1958
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It would be worth asking your GP to check an early morning blood cortisol to see if it is still high. Being on HRT or the contraceptive pill will also give a false "high". The fact that your reading is low at bedtime is good. If you have Cushing's disease/syndrome then cortisol is likely to be high at night. A normal early morning cortisol can be anything between 350-550nmol/Ls between 8-9am. Cortisol varies throughout the day but is at it's highest first thing in the morning.
It would still be worth getting your cortisol checked, but make sure you get a copy of your results as most GP's don't have a lot of understanding about cortisol levels.
The Medichecks adrenal test is pretty useless for a few reasons:
1) It doesn't include DHEA which is important as well as cortisol.
2) Two of the ranges have zero as the bottom end of the range, if anyone really did have a result of zero then I expect they would be very ill.
3) For the bedtime sample they don't give a level below 1.5, they just show it as <1.5 which is neither use nor ornament. Bedtime sample should be very bottom of range so just saying <1.5 tells us nothing because it could be zero and it could be 1.4 and there is a massive difference to interpreting the result then.
• Morning at the top of the range - yours is slightly over range and may be classed as OK.
• Noon approximately 75% of the range - yours is a long way over range
• Evening close to 50% of the range - 50% through that range is 2.75 so yours is fine
• Nighttime at the bottom of the range - yours is too high
A much better test which includes DHEA as well as cortisol and proper ranges for all samples, and a very similar price, is Regenerus or Genova Diagnostics.
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