In today’s scary world of rapidly spreading COVID-19 infections, most individuals are hesitant to have their health care provider, or worse, a stranger at a blood draw clinic, violate their mandated social space of 6 feet to allow them to stick a needle in their vein and draw blood for testing hormones. It is understandable why during the…
Tags: Blood Spot Testing, Cardiovascular Disease, Covid19, Hormone Testing, Heavy Metals, Vitamin D, Thyroid Health, Research, Menopause, Laboratory Quality
Here at ZRT, we clinicians are always reading. When we aren’t on the phones or completing laboratory reports for you, we are constantly researching and reading. We read everything from the books that some of you are writing to articles on Pubmed and Medscape. We thought that it might be fun to tell you what is currently on our reading agenda.…
Tags: ZRT Laboratory, Research
Testosterone, so meaningful to a man’s behavior, is the evolutionary force behind everything intrinsically “male.” Historical stereotypes peg testosterone as the macho elixir of legendary magnitude – the “chest-thumping hormone of aggression.” New research, however, is beginning to tease out previously unknown subtleties of testosterone’s effects on behavior. Testosterone is non-trivial for…
Tags: Testosterone, Research
One of the primary objectives of the Women's Health Initiative was to see if postmenopausal hormone replacement therapy (HRT) improved long-term risk of coronary heart disease, among other chronic diseases. However, the combined estrogen/progestin (Prempro) arm was halted in 2002, citing that the participants’ risk of cardiovascular disease outweighed any potential benefit of HRT in the prevention…
Tags: Hormone Balance, Menopause, BHRT, Research
Quality testing is a vital component of a physician's evaluation of a patient with a view to successful treatment. But how can health care providers ensure that the lab they are working with is giving them the quality they need? We’re often asked "Why should I partner with your lab? What distinguishes you from the others?" While many providers are expecting the obvious answers like fair prices and…
Tags: Research, Laboratory Quality
I wanted to share a few of the studies using saliva testing that were published in the literature in 2016. Just a hint, if you want to search for articles on saliva testing, use pubmed.gov and search saliva estradiol (or progesterone, testosterone etc.). Be aware that saliva hormone testing is so standard in the research world that rarely is it mentioned in the titles of the papers. Over 310…
Tags: Saliva Testing, Research, Estrogen, Testosterone, Progesterone, DHEA, Adrenal and Cortisol
I have to admit, I believe that "research" is one of those words that I think is often misused today. I started my own career in a cancer research lab, continued it in a pharmaceutical company research lab, and then got into medical information research and scientific writing, which meant using a range of medical literature databases and complex searching strategies. My early research career was…
Tags: Research, Laboratory Quality
CLIA-certified testing laboratories such as ZRT are required to provide reference ranges as an aid to interpretation of test results. Ideally, reference ranges provide the expected range of values for a healthy population. When methodology and equipment is identical for testing a particular analyte among different laboratories, reference ranges for that analyte should be the same. However, when…
Tags: Dried Urine Testing, Saliva Testing, Blood Spot Testing, Research
As more health care practitioners have understood the need to assess thyroid function based on what is going on at the cellular level, there has been an increasing demand for testing of reverse T3 (rT3), a hormone sometimes referred to as the “hibernation hormone.” However, there is also much confusion about how it fits into the picture of thyroid function, and controversy regarding whether…
Tags: Hormone Balance, Thyroid Health, Research
Thyroid hormones are essential for the normal metabolic functioning of all tissues in the body, and a wide array of symptoms are therefore associated with abnormalities in thyroid hormone production and activation. Even when apparently adequate amounts of thyroxine are produced by the thyroid gland, thyroid function is profoundly affected by anything that disrupts conversion of thyroxine…
Tags: Hormone Balance, Thyroid Health, Research
Call us at 866.600.1636 or email info@zrtlab.com