Who is This Test For?
When they’re working right, hormones in all individuals operate in a delicate balance to produce a feeling of well-being. But hormone levels change throughout the day and night and over the course of a lifetime, often resulting in a shortage or imbalance. A comprehensive hormone profile can help paint a portrait of hormonal status thereby helping patients and practitioners create a roadmap for optimal wellness.
FLUIDS iQ’s 24 hr Comprehensive Urine Hormone Profile – measuring all sex and adrenal hormones, and their metabolites - is a reliable means of assessing overall hormonal status, using state of the art technology to assure unparalleled accuracy, specificity and reproducibility.
24 hr Comprehensive Urine Hormone Profile
Urine: Wet vs Dry
24 hour ‘Wet Urine’ vs Dried Urine Hormone Analysis
The 24-hour comprehensive urine sex and adrenal hormone profiles – often called “The Gold Standard” in hormone testing – are the most established and reliable method for evaluating the production of steroid hormones and their metabolites. In clinical practice the results have a strong correlation with symptoms, as well as with the dosages of exogenous hormones.
The use of dried urine is a form of ‘spot testing’ – a brief moment in time – and cannot provide a truly representative picture of sex and adrenal hormone levels.
Here’s why: Hormones are secreted in a pulsatile fashion, with levels surging and ebbing, often irregularly. This can greatly distort the true picture of hormone production. Averaging results cannot solve this problem.
A ‘first morning’ urine sample can differ profoundly, depending on whether the subject awoke and urinated an hour or two earlier. Hormone levels in subsequent samples will also vary with hydration levels during the day.
Normalizing data on the basis of creatinine also has fundamental shortcomings. Diet, exercise and age of the subject are additional random variables affecting creatinine and undermining the clinical usefulness of dried urine as a means of measuring hormone levels.
The Advantages of 24 hr Comprehensive Urine Hormone Profiles (CUHP)
24 hr Comprehensive Urine Hormone Profiles (CUHP)
Most practitioners use 24 hr CUHP for the following reasons:- It represents a direct measurement of the availability of active free primary hormone to the tissue receptors.
- It provides a more detailed clinical picture by also measuring hormone metabolites, which highlight how the primary hormones are affected by enzymes and cofactors along the pathway from hormone synthesis to final hormone elimination. This gives essential information on how well the body is detoxifying the primary hormones. This has special importance in cases of personal or family history of breast or prostate cancer, as well as other hormone sensitive cancers.