How to Understand Hormone Levels

Maintaining a healthy hormone balance is essential for maintaining proper health. An over production, or under production of hormones can lead to problems such as infertility, early menopause and even body toxicity. To be able to understand your hormone levels, you will need to have a series of hormone tests to measure your current hormone levels. Hormone testing can help to accurately test hormone levels to see if there are any deficiencies in hormone levels and the possible reasons for hormone deficiencies such as menopause, emotional stress, inflammatory chemicals or injury.

Instructions

• 1

  Go to the doctor and get the proper hormone tests done to understand your hormone levels. If your hormone levels are dangerously low, your doctor may suggest a course of action such as hormone replacement therapy. After studying your hormone tests, your doctor will study the patterns and trends of your hormone levels over time, to determine which specific hormone replacement therapy is required.

• 2

  Ask the doctor to explain the results of your saliva test. Saliva testing is the most common used hormone test when measuring certain hormones, such as DHEA and cortical, two very important adrenal hormones. Saliva tests are usually used to detect levels of sex-hormones, produced in women by the ovaries and adrenal glands. The saliva samples will be collected at different intervals throughout the day, to accurately measure cortical levels, which can often fluctuate throughout the day.

• 3

  Wait for the results of your serum hormone test. Because not all hormones can be identified through the saliva alone, serum hormone tests are excellent alternatives. A serum hormone test is a blood test that will test not only for insulin and thyroid hormone levels, but will also provide a comprehensive metabolic profile of the patient. The serum test will also test for a number of other possible, related problems such as anemia, diabetes, liver disease and possible thyroid disorders.

• 4

  Ask the doctor to check your hormone levels, blood glucose levels, and insulin and hemoglobin levels with a saliva and blood spot combination test. These tests are powerful tools for assessing a wide range of hormone levels. The doctor can explain the results of these tests, providing you with a better understanding of your hormone levels.

• 5

  Allow the doctor to conduct a thyroid test. Having a thyroid test is important because it will give the doctor a chance to determine if the hormone imbalance may be related to a thyroid disease. The doctor will test a hormone in the body, known as thyroid stimulation hormone (TSH). TSH blood levels are known to rise when the thyroid is not producing adequate amounts of hormones.

• 6

  Ask the doctor to explain the results of your male hormone test. Doctors will use a blood test to test hormones that are dominant in the male body such as testosterone, androstenedione and DHEA-S. If you are a male and you are losing hair, have a low sex drive and infertility or erectile dysfunction, you may want to get a hormone test to see if your hormones are at the proper levels.