– Why salivary hormones?
– Well, so I would say salivary hormones for certain hormones. I wouldn’t say salivary hormones for all hormones and the reason is that you can get a pretty good assessment of sex hormone binding globulin, testosterone nowadays and thyroid hormones, those can be pretty well accurately measured by serum.
– Right, yeah.
– But when it comes down to like estrogens, progesterone, testosterone, and especially adrenal function.
– Cortisol levels.
– Cortisol levels, saliva’s pretty accurate and more so sometimes than serum because there’s no protein that’s binding those hormones. So you get to see what the free levels are, what’s available to the body.
– Right, the freely available hormones.
– Absolutely. Absolutely. And in addition to all of that, it doesn’t require a needle so there’s no trauma. It’s saliva. It’s saliva. So while I use serum testing for some things, I prefer to use saliva for others.