And all 35K results have been collated, analysed & made available so we can be better informed regarding expected Cortisol values based on sex (spoiler alert: women win & when I say win I mean track higher generally🤷‍♀️), age & life-stage. This month in our Mental Health Primer program I’m talking about how to look at labs through a mental health lens – from the most routine (ELFTs, FBE etc) to those 2nd tier assessments that we might sometimes recognise to provide essential information about our patients.  HPA assessment is such a big one in mental health and depression, specifically, because of the 2 major subtypes: typical (can’t sleep, can’t eat) and ‘atypical’ (over-sleeps, over-eats).   We all know that in ‘typical’ depression – the subtype we tend to over-focus on due to its dominance (and sometimes therefore miss the atypical patient at our own peril),  there is most characteristically a hyper-cortisolism, with poor negative feedback at the HP, allowing for these higher circulating levels. But is your depressed patient with sleep disturbance experiencing higher than healthy or expected cortisol release?  No, not necessarily.

You see even the 2 subtypes can have sub- sub- types.  Patients can have a diagnosis of either form of depression but have PTSD features or other psych and non-psych comorbidities that make it more probable that their adrenals and Cortisol are turned to ‘low’.
As in unhealthily & unhelpfully low.

And that would then necessitate a very different approach to treatment – a different choice of herbs and nutrients etc., right? As we’ve discussed before, accurately capturing cortisol is a task not for the faint-hearted!  Cortisol demonstrates such dynamism – not just regarding time of day and pre-test and test exposures & experiences, but also your geographical location in the world (!), not to mention choice of medium and which aspect of the HPA story that specifically reflects.   But for some patients it is essential for best management that we ‘feel the fear & undertake an assessment of their HPA function anyway’! But we need to ensure we get results we know how to accurately interpret.

I use different cortisol captures (saliva, urine, blood) to answer different questions – but if I want to understand the HPA functionality and performance and feedback…then measuring cortisol alone is not adequate – and we are back at blood, which offers us, as always, to go beyond a simple numerical: ‘adrenal output’ & also answer the question: “What were the adrenals TOLD to do?” aka where does any actual mismanagement lie & likewise, the key to correction.

Cortisol – Have you been caught out?

I have!  And just recently a stark contrast between the results from 2 different methods of cortisol capture in the same patient illustrated just how likely this is. How do we ‘capture’ something so ‘dynamic’ and interpret anything of substance from a ‘static’ assessment technique?   But rather than throw up our hands and throw out the whole attempt to measure cortisol, we can improve the rigor, reliability, and real-world meaningfulness of our patients’ results by refining our timing of tests, choosing the medium wisely & manipulating test conditions to answer specific questions about their HPA function.  Great ready reference resource included!